Tales of That Hunger
by Oeskathine
Summary: She thought the hardest part was over. Now Ingrid knows better: the world is an awful place. An ancient curse is devouring her slowly, she is across the whole continent from the people she loves, and her companions may be dead. This is a series of episodes that will take us from Rashemen to Crossroad Keep at the end, because we all need closure. Rated T for language and violence.
1. Prologue

Disclaimer: I own nothing in this world. Bioware claims to own Neverwinter Nights, let us believe that. Ingrid is her own woman – she often made choices I would not dare to, like abandoning a glorious career of a sorceress in order to pledge herself to Sehanine and follow the clerical path when she realized her companions needed more healing than firepower. Also, this story is complete, and I will post all the thirteen chapters as soon as I finish proofreading. This is but a prologue.

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1\. Prologue

She sits by the fire and tries not to whimper too much. Gann and Safiya throw careful glances at her now and then, and Ingrid knows they are concerned. Scared. She scares them.

It grows worse. The hollow cavern inside her is so empty and dark that she is sinking into it. Her ribcage constricts on itself. She tries to chew some bread, but she is not really hungry, it is just that weird feeling that gnaws at her gut day and night, day and night. She touches the place where her necklace should have been. Gone, as all of her belongings. She has never owned much, but now she is naked in the dark, a reprehensible monster lurks inside her, and she misses having something familiar to the touch. She summons her arcane magic, then her divine magic to feel their comforting thrumming. She manages to muster a small trickle of power, but it is too weak to distract her from the void that demands her attention and screams at her to crawl closer to Okku, to find a fey, a ghoul, something.

Ingrid hugs herself tighter and hums a prayer. She needs to deal with just another impossible thing, and fast. Her friends must be going crazy looking for her. Or they may be dead. Or they may be hurt, they may need her help. The gargoyles said that Casavir is dead, but that is not true: her goddess would tell her. Merciful Sehanine, the protector of loving souls, would tell her if he was in the gods' realm. A different fear grips Ingrid's heart. What if her goddess tried and she didn't heed the words in the haze of this excruciating fight with the hunger? What if she cannot hear the gods in this cursed state? Her normal feelings seem dull, her memories lack colour, and even Casavir's face is in fog. What if she does not have a soul for the gods to address? What is this thing inside her anyway?

She is injured and hurt and tired after the day's long road and deeply upset by the looks people give her wherever they pass. She had faced ungrounded hostility before everybody started to love her all of a sudden, and she knows how to deal with it, but it has never been like this. This guarded fear and unkind whispers are completely new and way more disheartening. Villagers make a sign against evil and do not look her in the eye; mothers hide their children in their skirts and old women spit at her sight. A spirit eater is a monster whose humanity is all pretend to them. Half of the nights they camp in the cold hills of Rashemen because no one would take their coin. Those who do take her coin charge her extra for the bedding they will have to burn afterwards.

Ingrid is not used to the level of hatred reserved for inhuman threats. These days, she thinks about the Shadow King a lot. He used to be a man, he was consumed, he was a monster and they killed him. It is simple, there was no different way. Yet being in his place is horrifying. She was sorry for him the day she learned his story – how he sacrificed himself to protect Illefarn, how he was in pain and screamed in the cruel transformation, how his sentience was taken from him. Now Ingrid cannot but compare her new burden with that ancient one. This spirit eater curse smells somehow similar, somehow connected.

The sad thoughts make her forget about the hunger momentarily. Or perhaps the essence of the monster is partially sentient, and it listens to her musings. This is not especially encouraging. Or maybe it is. She starts talking to it tentatively, as if she is talking to an injured child. The hunger listens quietly, and she is flooded with some vague longing, some muted desperation. She sighs and tries to lull them two, the restless companions, to sleep. It starts to snow, and first winter snowflakes – large, soft, beautiful – float in the air. Tomorrow they will set off for the deeper parts of Ashenwood.


	2. Gann

Disclaimer: I own nothing in this world. I am still waiting for Bioware to remember that it owns Neverwinter Nights. Gann is too young to understand who owns him, you should not forget that he is an orphan in a very cruel part of the world. No wonder his imagination leads him to dangerous waters.

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2\. Gann

They reach another village before another nasty spring storm breaks out, and Gann sighs in relief when the innkeeper takes pity on them and lets them in. Perhaps it is not his compassion as much as the fact that the inn is empty and extremely run down that makes him disregard their origins and appearances. A spirit eater, a hagspawn and a Red Wizard. At least their teltor warrior does not need a roof and prefers to sleep underneath the frosty skies in the open air.

Of course, Ingrid pays double and takes three separate rooms, too. They have enough gold to spare and she is indifferent to it anyway. As Gann watches her disappear upstairs, her back very rigid with exhaustion and yet very straight, he sighs and rubs his temple. The days when he was her companion only to stay out of his prison are long gone. Now he cares. Too much.

He goes upstairs after a hapless meal of cold bread, cheese and smoked winter sausage they share with Safiya in silence. He knows that Safiya is wondering why her mother and Lienna chose to display such cruelty and plant Akachi the Betrayer in Ingrid's chest, to mercilessly butcher her fate and life. She probably believes that he is thinking about his mother and the hags. He is not. Too much happened over the week, and even the disclosure of those mysteries of his origin cannot compete with the vision of the Wall of the Faithless – limbs protruding at awkward angles, screams of suffering people in his ears, the smell of rotting leaves in the air. Cries of children who died before they had the capacity and the time to believe and worship. Ingrid, pale as death, reaching out for that man's – Bishop's – slimy hand, talking to him gently as if his betrayal had never happened.

Gann discards most of his stinking clothes and hangs them to dry on the chairs. He is spent and his feet hurt, but sleep does not accept him in its obliviating embrace. He thinks of Ingrid and what will happen if they do not find the cure for the curse soon. Spirit eaters never lasted that long.

It has been a full year, and she must be running on pure willpower. She controls her hunger better now that she is used to it and understands its routines, but there is less and less of her left to conquer it. She has grown fragile; her new injuries take longer to heal and sometimes he is surprised she can walk on her own. Gann has a kind and compassionate soul, and too often he feels completely helpless when Ingrid is in pain. She is in pain most of the time, for a brief respite from the Hunger can only be earned by the atrocity of erasing a spirit from the eternity. Moreover, every time her black shadow feeds, it grows stronger, and most of the time Ingrid chooses to suffer and abstain. He tries to read her, and he knows that by imagining this window into her mind he is about to fall in love. He is about to start imagining more and more. He cannot quite resist. It is innocent and harmless, so why the hells not.

He thinks about the night when he invaded her dream out of pure curiosity and saw her as she remembers herself – younger, prettier, carefree. The stoic woman he knows is a ghost of her former self.

A knock at his door arouses Gann from his half-dreams, half-memories. He jerks upright and opens the door. Ingrid steps into the room and Gann can see that she is in disarray. The dark areas under her eyes are noticeable even in the flickering candlelight. She is wearing a blanket over the same road clothes, half-buttoned as if she had started to undress and forgot about it. Silent tears roll down her face, and she is shivering. She walks into the room and sinks down on his bed as if it hurts her to stand. It probably does.

"I can't be alone." Ingrid says in a hollow, emotionless voice. "I'm losing it. I need company. Warmth."

Gann is uncomfortably aware that Ingrid's eyes are almost completely black. His gaze travels down to deep marks on her arms. She had evidently bitten on her wrists to keep from screaming. He chokes on his emotions and wraps another blanket and his arms around her skinny frame. She holds on to him for dear life. They sit like that for a while, and Ingrid slowly slackens her grip. He can hear her clench and unclench her teeth as waves of pain rise and subside. He starts to cry because he is so helpless, useless, inadequate, and she looks up and smiles at him bravely. Gann's insides tighten into a knot: she always puts on a mask to keep the others from feeling bad around her, these smiles are walls between them. One day she will refuse her dinner politely, pack her bag, make her bed and go to the forest to die quietly.

Ingrid's breath catches. Gann already knows what it means: the worst is about to come. She will have a minute of complete detachment while the hunger pushes at its chains madly, and then she will either stamp down on it or be consumed. Her face goes blank and cruel, and this wretched minute lasts and lasts and lasts, and Gann freaks out. He cannot think of anything better, and he has never been a good thinker in the first place, so he does what his intuition prompts. He presses her flush against his body and kisses her just like he had always wanted to kiss someone dear in the flesh, in the real world. She does not respond, but his ardour must have shocked her into feeling again, because after a minute she tenses and withdraws slightly.

Gann looks into her eyes and is happy to see no scorn there. She regards him with a strange, bleak expression he cannot quite place.

"I am better now." She hesitates for a moment and continues. "Thank you."

Gann wants to keep her close, and he does not release her even when she looks at the door. Ingrid sighs.

"Gann, I cannot reciprocate whatever it is that you are confessing now." Her voice is very tired, and this takes the edge off the remark.

"You are not going to die." He dares to offer, but Ingrid shakes her head in disbelief.

"It's not _that_. I am only holding up because I have someone I need to get back to. Something terrible has happened to him. I know I loved him with all my heart before this curse stripped me of it. My life and afterlife are promised to him, Gann."

"I understand that." His voice is light, and he finally releases her from his embrace. So many things are clearer now. "Finding such love is rare and you need to fight for your life to keep it then. I will not distract you with my unwelcome affection."

Ingrid folds her hands in her lap and stares at them.

"Today your affection helped me walk back from the brink of my madness. I want… I know I don't have a soul, and nothing matters to me much except the things I keep repeating in my mind, so it will probably seem abhorrent to me when I am truly back, but…" Her voice is barely audible. "In case I am lost again, you have my permission to use whatever means you can think of to help me return."

Ingrid stands up, squeezes his hand lightly and disappears in the darkness of the corridor. Gann stares at the door. His mind runs wild with possibilities of what these words may mean before he manages to collect his thoughts. The real Ingrid wants to get her love for another man back, and he intends to respect that. However, he never exactly needed the real world, so he can allow himself to dream of her. A little. Sometimes. Without going too far.


	3. Ingrid

Disclaimer: I own nothing in this world. Even my body is rented from the biogeochemical cycle of the planet for 70-80 years of metabolism. I definitely do not own Neverwinter Nights.

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3\. Ingrid

'Cruelty' is the word she was trying to remember for the past few days. She is growing cruel.

Ingrid grimaces inwardly with every step of her horse along the forest path. She keeps her jaw firmly set and her fists clenched. If she relaxes her muscles, she may fall off the saddle, and she cannot be sure she will rise again. The chestnut mare is old and docile, but Ingrid is no rider now. She lags behind the others. At least this way her companions cannot see that she is deep in her grave, toxic thoughts again.

She is growing cruel. Whether it is because she is soulless or because she has finally had too much, she cannot say. Killing off the helpless hags in their enchanted sleep was cruel. Her former self would have taken mercy on them. There was no reason to devour their souls. Well, Gann was angry at them. She is sure her eloquence could have convinced him to let the hags live, but she was starving, and the temptation made her keep silent. The hunger tricked her and was back with a vengeance the very next day. The carnage was unnecessarily wasteful. Cruel.

She makes an effort to focus on the autumn leaves that float by her tunnel vision scope. Her former self would be enjoying the scenery. Rashemen must be a beautiful country with its numerous crystal lakes, gentle hills, ancient forests, and those mysterious snow-capped mountains in the east. She had never seen pine trees the size of castle towers. In her present state, however, the land is merely an annoying mass of obstacles. It lasts and lasts between her destinations. Trees fall and block paths, streams crisscross in a quaint pattern, every hill is an agonizing ascent and an even more torturous descent. At times she is convinced that she is already dead, and they just keep dragging her corpse across the plain by mistake.

She remembers the concepts of waste and mercy, and she still tries to minimize collateral damage when possible, but all this death does not touch her the way it used to do. Her world has been pressed down into a few simple objectives she keeps repeating to herself. Stop the curse. Get my soul back. Get back. Find Casavir.

Ammon Jerro said that Casavir had died, but that is not true. He said that her paladin had been crushed by the pillar he was trying to hold on his shoulders to let the others run for safety. That his spine gave in and shattered under the impossible weight and he was buried under tons of rock. That it was a good death befitting such a selfless hero.

Ammon Jerro was never her favourite person. The moment she saw his lifeless body in the academy's basement she did not quite recall who he was, it all came back to her later – with the voice, the smell, the posture. She only knew he used to travel with her, and that made him good enough for her to sacrifice two souls for his revival, and only when he was surprised and questioned her, she remembered Shandra and her awful death at his hands. This man committed a crime and his trial never happened because they were in the middle of a war and they needed him desperately.

He knows nothing. There is no good death. No good death claims a good, selfless person. She could not possibly be more devastated than she already is, so she chose to disregard his opinion. She will escape the curse, get back across the whole continent and find Casavir, even if he is dead.

It was three weeks ago. Three weeks of messing autumn mud under their horses' feet because the bloody portal would not hold. Making a new one was going to take months, Safiya said. They did not have months. Ingrid did not think she had even one month ahead of her, so they bought horses.

Now she must face the truth that she will not make it. Her body served her well, but there are limits to everything. Ingrid's head is clouded; she keeps weaving the thread of her gruesome inner conversation because this is the conversation she has been delaying.

She cannot bear it anymore.

She is going to die soon.

She would cry at this realization if death were not so attractive at this point. Instead, Ingrid is hit with nausea and though thankfully there is absolutely nothing she can stuff her bile with, their small caravan stops, concerned looks are exchanged, she is lifted off the saddle so very gently by Gann's now familiar arms, and Safiya's now familiar half-embrace, half-support keeps her seated while they pour some cool liquid into her mouth. She cannot muster enough interest to ask them what it is.

They take a short rest and set off for the final leg of their trip for the day. Another village is not very far: the high autumn sky is marred by a column of grey smoke in the distance.

Killing the young Red Wizards was cruel as well. The students were young and inexperienced, if mean and eager to attack. They were no match for their sophisticated company. Safiya has a theory that life is a filter for the Weave, and whatever is left of Ingrid conducts magic with almost no resistance. Her dry body is like a metal rod amidst a thunderstorm: she has an intention to burn something, and hell goes loose a second later.

No, these apprentices were no match for them. Puppies. She has been killing puppies, that's what it is called. What is worse, Ingrid almost shot a fireball at the Founder, too. Not because she wanted revenge. Not because she had been spirited away from her battle, her friends were left to die, her body was dissected like a rat on that grisly table and her life became a bloody sacrifice to the worst monster imaginable, the kind that leaves no hope behind. No. The ancient crone was simply annoying; her voice was too high and she spoke too slowly. If Safiya had not called her 'Mother' by mistake and some instinct of Ingrid's had not latched on the word, the witch would not live to say another sentence.

The hooves start to clink against stone. This road is paved.

This is what cruelty is. Another fault of hers is that she devoured Mirkul's soul, presumably to give him peace, but Ingrid knows her reasons better. There is not enough of her mind left to have complicated, calculated reactions. Mirkul admitted that he was using her to inspire fear and that let him linger in the limbo of the Gods' cemetery. She had been used and abused enough. She wanted to see fear in his eye pits. She had been a good priest, she had served her people with all her heart, she used to be an honest believer, and if the gods chose to turn her humility into humiliation, she is evidently well-equipped to bring them death now.

Slowly, they trail along the bare path up the hill, and the biting wind makes her shiver.

Ingrid runs through the preparations for her death they had long discussed with her companions. When she cannot move any longer, Safiya will make camp in some isolated place and stay with her. The scholarly woman will inherit the curse. She had been taking notes – doing research – on everything that happens to them, and Ingrid is apprehensive about losing the most intelligent member of their party to the bleak fate. She would really prefer to sacrifice Gann or Kaelyn, but there is no saying if Akachi the Betrayer harbors any prejudice against hagspawn or celestials, so it must be the human among them who will pick up the curse. If only Ingrid proved to be two months stronger.

They enter a fenced yard and the three of her companions dismount while Ingrid, the wretched Spirit Eater, waits in the saddle. The innkeeper asks a chain of quick, careful questions she cannot and does not want to discern.

So, she is indeed cruel. She will die soon, and she will die a cruel person. When she meets Casavir in the afterlife he will not recognize her, and Tyr will judge her and find her lacking.

They are given one room upstairs. It is all right because she does not really sleep and can only nod off in an armchair if someone keeps the fire burning. Gann helps her out of her riding cloak and leads her to the hearth. The room is small. Someone had tried to make it cozy. There is a dirty, unpolished mirror on the wall and a dying potted plant. Perhaps the wife or the daughter of the innkeeper passed away recently, and nobody takes care of her unfinished business now. Ingrid stares into the dim, dirty mirror.

Casavir will not recognize her for many reasons. Maybe it is good that her misplaced soul is melting into the Wall of the Faithless.

She is not even beautiful anymore. Her eyes are haunted. Her hair is laced with grey. She is skeletal. She looks fifty. She tries to remember when her birthday was and comes to the conclusion that she turned thirty-two somewhere on the way to Lluru wells. It has been seventeen months since she woke up in the teltor barrow and struggled to piece her world together. When her lover sees her – _if_ he sees her – he will not be appalled by her look: Casavir was never petty like that. Her cruelty, however, is a different thing. Appearance can be concealed, changed, restored or disregarded. A corrupted heart rusts and rots until there is nothing but filthy dust left.

If she dies on the way, they will never meet again. They were ready to fall in battle and prayed to their respective gods to let them be together in death. To die like this is a… betrayal.

If she makes it to Mulsantir, the four of them will descend into the shadows and she will give free reins to the Hunger. She does not need to care about the nice fat undead down there, they are as awful an abomination as she is. Maybe, just maybe, she will scrape up enough strength to fight her way through to Kelemvor's realm. People cannot die in it, so she will have to linger for the mere lack of other options. What is to happen then? She may attempt to devour Kelemvor, whatever it brings upon their heads. She may fall to her knees and beg him to take pity on her. If one Lord of the Dead turned Akachi into a monster, cannot another, a better one, a just one, give peace to his suffering soul?

Ingrid repeats the words of her usual prayer. They are alien. She cannot comprehend their meaning.


	4. The Veil

Disclaimer: I own nothing in this world. And if I owned Neverwinter Nights, you would not be reading this story, you would be playing NWN 3.

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4\. The Veil

As soon as she recovers her consciousness in the tiny backroom of the Veil, Ingrid has a vague desire to leave the place. She attempts to sit up in bed, but she is as weak as a newborn kitten. A quick survey of the room is enough for her to realize that the nightmare she woke up from did happen, and a second later she is hit with the full force of all the emotion from that day long ago. The day her company defeated a great evil to be defeated by tons of rock.

She remembers the walls caving in, those elegant pillars collapsing with dreamlike slowness, the marble floor shaking and sinking under their feet. She ran dry, out of spells completely. Her friends were supporting each other, all wounded, battered up, bleeding. She was leading the way, and then Grobnar did the silliest thing he could – he rushed to protect his precious golem, the Construct, from a collapsing arch, and part of the wall crumbled and buried their sweet little bard. Ingrid froze in horror, Casavir shoved her to Khelgar, and then something happened, because Khelgar was suddenly carrying her, no, dragging her, and the narrow corridors faded in and out, Casavir was shouting something, and… And then nothing.

It was nineteen months ago. Ingrid knows that these nineteen months passed. She remembers the events, the trips, the conversations, the fights, the bargains. Somehow that single day nineteen months ago is fresh, raw, sore; the nineteen months seem to be ancient history.

She is a continent away from the place where she ought to be.

A whole week drags by before she can even sit on her own.

Gann is never far. While Safiya takes care of her food and healing, he keeps watch over her dreams. She sleeps at odd hours and every time she drifts off into a wild maze of fears, wishes, memories and horrors, he is there. He guides her gently though the worst of her dreams and adds subtle changes to the grim paths her mind follows. If she is locked, a key appears. If she is lost, a road emerges from the dark. If she witnesses a death, his soft voice whispers that it is a dream, nothing but a dream. This is awfully intimate, to be that vulnerable and open to a person. Yet she is extremely grateful to him: being able to sleep, she heals.

Kaelyn appears in her room one crispy morning. Her pearl-white wings are too large for the small closed space. She is leaving Rashemen to deliver the news of Akachi's peaceful end to other planes and recruit warriors for her next crusade. Ingrid wishes her good luck and answers Kaelyn's silent question: she will not. She cannot. She has done her part for now. The Wall of the Faithless is a tragedy, and she got the distinct impression that Kelemvor himself was unwilling to keep it – but a burning need drives her to the West, and she cannot ignore it. Those she loved may be dead, or lost, or looking for her, and Ingrid needs to know the truth.

Okku comes to bid his farewell next. Ingrid can walk already, and she meets him in the small garden behind the theatre. The bear god is almost corporeal, his ornate fur glitters in the winter sun. Winter sun in Rashemen is like nowhere else: the frosty air burns her lungs, but the sky is high and clear as a bell, the snow sparkles under their feet, and the day has a celebratory ring to it. Okku inhales the air noisily and explains that he wants to go back to sleep now. His mission has been completed. Ingrid thanks him heartily and thinks that she is going to miss this honest, honorable creature.

Winter is going to leave the land soon. Ingrid hopes that by early spring she will be able to ride a horse, carry her load, be on her own again. Her mind soars above the ground in her dreams and she sees the forests, the great steppes, the endless Anauroch desert, the rough terrain of wild lands where barbarian clans ride, and the mountains she will have to cross to get back home. This is no small task for anyone, to say nothing of a lone woman who has just returned from the death's threshold and weighs but a hundred pounds.

Safiya is just as anxious to get back to her academy. They left the citadel in a hurry, the power vacuum hanging in the air. Anyone could walk in and establish their own order. She is ready to take up the responsibility. Ingrid is sure her friend will make a wonderful headmistress. However, Safiya spends two months nursing Ingrid back to health. Ingrid understands that. Safiya believes that her… family, for the lack of a better word, is responsible for Ingrid's state, and she takes it upon herself to pay their debts. Ingrid could argue that is not necessary, but she knows Safiya and knows that it is necessary indeed. Both for the sake of her convalescence and for the sake of Safiya's self-esteem and honour.

In mid spring Ingrid finally makes a full recovery. Many of the lines in her face will stay forever, her hair is mostly grey with several black locks in it, and she is still too thin. Her strength and stamina, however, are at the level where she can risk a trip, and no power can keep her in Mulsantir now.

Not that anyone wants to keep her here. The wise witches are impeccably polite and friendly in a distant way, but they expect her to leave as soon as she can. The actors at the Veil remember her defending them, but they stay at arm's length. The general population is afraid of her if just to be on the safe side. With all but Gann leaving and ready to move on with their lives, Ingrid has no ties except the frailty of her own constitution.

Gann surprises her once again. He intends to accompany her to the Sword Coast. On second thought, it makes perfect sense. He has never had a place here: he will go back to prison as soon as some farmer complains of the filthy hagspawn harassing his daughter. His magical talent is going to waste here, for he is a man, and men are forbidden from practising the arcane in this mysterious country. Ingrid has learnt recently that Rashemen used to have more equal laws, and men's magic became punishable only after some ancient union of wise chiefs confirmed that magic and the power it brought corrupted people, and men were somehow more susceptible to the temptation to abuse their power. Ingrid spends a couple of days turning the idea over and over in her head like a pebble and concludes that it is not right. Everywhere, responsible and empathetic men and women call on their powers to help people, and if some men in the history of Faerun were notorious for darker spells and most awful deeds, that was the problem with the specific people, not their gender. Irresponsibility and weakness are relative. In elves' eyes, for instance, all people are irresponsible and short-sighted in a way that does not mix with magic very well. In the gods' eyes, even elves are mere toddlers with sharp knives in their hands.

She will certainly accept Gann's company even if he seems to be hopelessly in love with her and his youth makes him believe this fascination is forever and he should lead a selfless, tragic existence and serve her. There is nothing for him in this hardened, tough land. Ingrid will take him to a safer place. Then he will meet someone as sweet and easy on the eyes as he is, and he will get over his infatuation with the first woman who treated him with respect.

It is 1376, Year of the Bent Blade. What a fitting name indeed.


	5. The Journey

Disclaimer: I own nothing in this world. All the cities, lakes and forests in this chapter are owned by Wizards of the Coast, the company with a most suspicious name that would like us to believe that the continent of Faerun is completely fictituous.

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5\. The Journey

The two of them leave Mulsantir aboard a large fishing boat named 'Ghost'. It takes them across Lake Ashane to Ashanath, a mostly uninhabited land in the easternmost part of Thesk. On the lakeshore, there is a small settlement of hunters and fishermen who stay here in winter and salt reindeer meat and large pale trout from the lake until spring storms drive them back to their villages with the winter's catch.

The land officially belongs to Thesk, but it still recovers from the invasion of the Tuigan Horde several years ago. There are bandits on every road, local conflicts have gripped every town, and next to no administration is functioning, so the travellers choose to pass unnoticed through the northern plain, mostly uninhabited due to violent tornadoes. It is the high season. For the first time in her life, Ingrid sees these whirlpools of raw wind in the distance. Thankfully, none of them cross their immediate way.

They reach the Forest of Lethyr and cross it with the help of Arlianda, a sullen ranger who stumbles upon them on the forest edge. She is an elven girl who barely speaks. She also has an axe. And a longbow. They have food and she is hungry, so they share dinner and Ingrid hires the taciturn wildling to guide them. She leads them around bear caves and wolf lairs, across treachery bogs and over ancient traps – exchanging three to four words a day. By a miracle, Ingrid learns that the forest elf is barely thirty, her parents are dead, and she has met exactly six sentient living beings before. It goes without saying that Arlianda stays with them when they are out of the woods.

Nyth would have been a convenient port to find passage by ship to one of the bigger towns and then cross the inland sea, the Sea of Fallen Stars. Unluckily, some recent trouble with a necromancer makes the locals meet them with hostility and violence. They must take a roundabout way to Tellflamm, an independent city-state ruled by the mysterious Shadowmasters. It almost seems that the city runs itself but for a thousand invisible rules they come across every time they struggle to talk to the locals. Silk and spices, wine and jewels, a hundred languages and merchants of all shapes and colours – yet no ship will take them out into the sea until some important negotiations with the new pirate lords are over.

In Telflamm they hire Jenkins, an interpreter. He is a halfling bard that speaks twenty of the local languages and, most importantly, the Common Tongue of the West. He is also a pacifist and does not touch a weapon. Excited at meeting native speakers, Jenkins tells them that he has learnt the Common Tongue by reading Deekin's book. Ingrid cannot resist telling him that his favourite author is a merchant in her keep. The bard is so eager to meet Deekin in person that he asks for a place in their motley band. Why not a halfling bard who speaks without inflections, Ingrid thinks to herself as she nods her consent.

The only ships sailing off into the West at this time of the year are freetraders, which is the local name for pirates. They manage to buy passage as far as Tsurlagol, a smaller yet vibrant city of pirates, merchants and smugglers, burned to the ground and rebuilt so many times that its citizens are now proud of it. On the way their ship is assaulted four times. By the time they cast anchor in the bay, most of the crew and all the passengers have to bail out water faster than it comes into the hull.

From Tsurlagol they take the hard and rocky Stormcrest Trail north, aiming to get to the old trail that crosses Cormanthor. The Inner Sea is too dangerous, Ingrid muses to distract herself from the ache in her tired feet. Pirates are a folk she is unfamiliar with. She does not know what commands respect with them, and her linguistic skills are sadly lacking. They may have a better chance in another ancient elven forest, even if it is deserted, wild, dangerous and creeping with various unpleasant creatures.

In the small town of Sevenecho they stay at the Worried Wyvern, one of the best inns Ingrid has ever seen. The attention to detail in it is striking and it almost makes her wish to become an innkeeper herself. They learn that this year the four forests of Cormanthor are engaged in a bloody war between several elven kingdoms and demons, devils, daemonfay and what not under the command of some powerful half-fiend sorceress with royal ancestry. Ingrid decides that a war of this scale and complexity will swallow them whole and spit their bones afterwards, so they will have to choose some other road.

Pirates and slavers in the south, a bloody abysmal war in the west, and in the north – a chaotic mess of nomadic tribes, orc clans and human villages where everyone has a sword from the age of seven? The choice is obvious.

The four of them hire a small schooner to cross the Moonsea and venture into the inhospitable moors of Thar and the Stojanow valley. It is the harvest season, and the villages in the valley are arming up in tense expectation of raids from orcs and barbarians. They happen to be in the village that gets pillaged by a berserker clan from the Vale. They are taken as prisoners and are marched north with the other captives. At least this is a human clan of the Vaegould, Ingrid learns as she practices her meagre Erakic vocabulary with some farmer's daughter. They could be much worse off if the pillagers were the Skullsmashers, the fierce tribe of ogres from the moorland. Indeed, Ingrid wonders as she watches the barbarians shoot arrows at some poor woman who cannot walk anymore.

She pretends to be older than she is, and her grey hair probably saves her from cruelty. Gann and the bard sing well and are alive for this reason. Arlianda has disappeared, and Ingrid can swear the young elf follows the horde covertly. For the millionth time, Ingrid wishes they had been able to make a portal. The craft is intricate, and Rashemen is too far from Neverwinter to just will the portal into existence. They would have needed two powerful mages on each end of the portal, their mutual awareness of what they were trying to accomplish and simultaneous efforts. When she is back in Crossroad Keep, she will try to make one with Safiya. Perhaps she will find a way to establish a weekly connection with all major cities. It will boost the trade and save diplomatic emissaries a lot of trouble.

Well, that sounds like a great plan, but she needs to find their way out of slavery first.

True to her luck, when they reach the campsite of the clan and the vibrant local aristocracy shares the spoils, she is picked up by the chieftain himself. She does not have much opportunity to learn his reasons, because that very night at the grand celebration the said chieftain is poisoned, and chaos ensues. Arlianda chooses this exact moment to appear to their rescue. After a moment's hesitation Ingrid applies her fresh linguistic achievements and her battle voice to commanding the chieftain's guard, his children and her companions (who believe she has gone completely insane) to carry the choking chieftain into his tent. She heals him over the night, and as a sign of gratitude he grants them freedom and returns their belongings. A thought of freeing the other slaves flashes across Ingrid's mind when she clenches her fingers around the grip of her sword. She lets the impulse fade – this would be a massacre, and who knows if these barbarians are what keeps orc tribes in line. Unaware of the threat that has loomed over his clan for a second, the chieftain gives them horses and sends them off. His eldest son, the young Tarro, is ordered to accompany them to the border of the Ride.

Tarro is seventeen, half-elven for some reason and his stunning ferocity compensates for his slim build. Later on the road Ingrid will learn that he is a child of rape and misfortune, that his elven mother died in captivity, that being small and slender is a tragedy for a berserker he is supposed to be, and that his father wants to get rid of him and appoint a younger, stronger and taller son as his heir. If he gets back to his clan, he will get one suicide task after another until he is dead.

Well, a human priestess with the Silver Sword of Gith, a hagspawn shaman who walks dreams and talks to spirits, an elven ranger with communication issues and a pacifist halfling bard who speaks like a kobold. A half-elven barbarian can hardly make them look any weirder. She rides across the great sea of early autumn grass and wonders why she always travels with most unlikely companions. Is it her destiny or the world is indeed that strange? Perhaps the next companion she will pick up on the way will be a simple, humble human warrior without any personal drama, complicated past and impossible quests to fulfill on the way.

The gods have a perfect sense of irony, she grants them that. Approaching Dagger Falls past sundown, they stumble upon some farmers. They throw stones at a person who pleads for help. Though they cannot see her in the moonlight, and they do not really understand what the farmers say, Ingrid and Gann stop them and bargain for the life of the poor individual. The farmers reward them with weird looks, accept their money and leave them to take in the new addition to their band. It is an orc. Not a half-orc, but a full orc, complete with fangs, green skin and whiskers. A lady orc, too. And her name is Kharin. And she wants to learn to be an architect. When Kharin predictably asks if she can travel with them, Ingrid finds herself unable to refuse the begging intonation in her voice. Despite the nervousness her companions exude in varying degrees, she agrees to take Kharin under her protection.

Compared to the previous journey, they cross the goddamn Anauroch desert almost uneventfully. The winter is upon them, so it is stifling hot during the days, bitter cold during the nights and generally awful all the time. They meet a band of sand people, some scorpions the size of cartwheel horses and a diffident manticore who retreats at the sight of the lightning buzzing between Ingrid's hands. By the end of this leg of their trip her companions have helped one another enough times to establish the usual rapport of travel friends. They joke and bicker and tell stories, and even the ranger girl now speaks full paragraphs and the bard teaches her to read and write. While she sits by the small nightfire, Ingrid is flooded by the memories of her other companions bickering in a similar manner in her other life. For a moment, the two parties blur into each other, and she almost expects Casavir to appear from the night shadows with a bunch of firewood or something like that. As if he has just walked away and will return at any minute. She smiles a sad, longing smile. Her love is full of sorrow, but having it nestled in her chest is welcome: she remembers the emptiness of a spirit eater all too well.

The Black Road leads them across the Lonely Moor and the Graypeak Mountains to Loudwater and Secomber, and after that the lands are familiar. They are still very far away, but the trees, the landscape patterns, the languages are familiar to her. Her companions certainly look at everything with wide eyes, or in case of Arlianda, with narrowed eyes to mask her previous ignorance of things like running water in the taverns where they stay. They have run out of gold. Ingrid heals and blesses at a small cost wherever they pass, Gann and Jenkins sing at taverns, Arlianda hunts on the way. They move closer and closer to her destination.

From the roads shooting off to Waterdeep and Triboar, they pick Triboar as their route. The rumour goes, the Sword Mountains are more dangerous than they have ever been, and all garrisons up to Old Owl Well have retreated to Neverwinter. They are so close that it would be disappointing to perish at the hands of orc clans at the very end.

From Triboar they trek across the plains for another fortnight, and then, finally, Ingrid sees the proud towers of Crossroad Keep in the distance.

Her heart sings at the sight.


	6. Crossroad Keep

Disclaimer: I wish I owned something in this world, but - alas for me - I own nothing. Definitely not Neverwinter Nights. I could claim that I own Ingrid, but Ingrid always disagrees.

* * *

6\. Crossroad Keep

Ingrid hardly expects to be recognized – grey hair, foreign clothes and all. The garrison has changed completely, and among the steady stream of citizens though the gates their party does not even look too out of the ordinary. Ingrid takes in the renovations, the new houses on the hill below the fortress, the loud noise of the market in the courtyard. The keep is growing into a busy town, and soon it will grow into a city. They rent rooms at the Phoenix Tail and no one blinks an eye at Gann's blue skin and Kharin's fangs. Good. Her motherland does not disappoint.

Ingrid lingers in the inn's common room nursing a mug of hot cider and tells the others they can go get some food and do their shopping without her. She wants to listen to the conversations. To her disappointment, people talk about farmwork, hunting, fishing, torn shoes, lost keys, and not about missing paladins or past battles. _This is good_, she reminds herself, _this is peace_. For a minute she entertains this wild hope that the tragedies might be over, that she will hear their names in the routine gossip. That Casavir is somewhere in the keep, or on the walls, and he may enter the tavern in a minute and all her apprehension will look ridiculous.

A tall man in a sky-blue cloak enters the inn, and Ingrid's heart flutters like a trapped bird in a child's hands.

This is not her tall man in a blue cloak. Some sickening foreboding melts down into a heavy lead ball and weighs down on her stomach.

Ingrid finishes her cider in one gulp, leaves a coin on the table and exits the room. She cannot afford to entertain her illusions. If they are dead, they are dead. Why should a priestess who talked to gods even be scared of death?

_Because gods are cruel and mean bastards_, her inner voice offers helpfully.

It is Khelgar who runs the keep, his cloak with the embroidered sigil of Neverwinter gives out that he is one of the Nine. He is so happy to see her that he keeps laughing and crying at the same time. We lost all hope, lass. We kept looking, but no goddamn gargoyles anywhere, and not even a rumour of a silver sword. Daeghun sifted through half the coast with his own hands, lass. Where the hell have you been for three years?

Kana happens to walk by the reception room with a load of papers, and after a brief stunned moment she marches to them in a confident military stride, drops the papers on the desk and surprises Ingrid with a ribsmashing hug. Welcome back, my lady. The keep is yours, adds Khelgar, I will write Nasher right away and go get drunk. Feel free to join me.

She shakes her head and asks them about the others. She learns that Neeshka and Khelgar were chasing the gargoyles that carried her out of the collapsing fortress and the two of them were almost on the surface. Neeshka is in Neverwinter. Sand had polymorphed into a stone golem and was later dug out by the search party, he occupies the mage's tower here at the keep. Elanee was not lucky, she was crushed on the way. They found her body and buried her in the small grove within the castle walls. She saw Grobnar die, didn't she. Zdzaeve died her mortal death and goes on in her astral realm; Sand contacted her to learn of Ingrid's fate, but she did not know much except that the Sword of Gith was in the mortal plane.

This leaves one person, and Ingrid thinks she can discern the answer from the way Khelgar is shifting from foot to foot nervously, and Kana is not looking her in the eye.

Casavir?

Khelgar shakes his head.

"No one knows, lass. He was caught under a rock, shouted for me to get you, then the ceiling behind us crumbled and blocked the way out for him. We took the ruins apart three weeks later, as soon as I was back to my feet, but nothing. Someone got there before us. No body in the ruins, no paladin anywhere. I had been hoping the same gargoyles had him, but they didn't, did they?"

The first thought that shoots though her mind is that he must be alive. All the thoughts that follow are much, much worse. _Not now_, she tells herself stubbornly, _not in the presence of those who already worry about you._

It is late. Kana sends a boy to the inn to tell her fellow travellers that Ingrid will meet them in the morning. Sand turns up. They share a meal. She tells them a short version of her three years. They keep giving her small touches of support as if they want to check she is real. At last, it is time to go to bed, and Ingrid refuses the nicer guest rooms in the new part of the castle. She is desperate to return, to feel that she has returned, and the feeling is strangely absent.

Her and Casavir's chambers have been left untouched, locked and barred from any intrusion. She enters the room – they left it early that bleak morning almost three years ago. They had had little sleep, talking and clinging to each other as if they knew they would never be in this room again. Her things and his things are all in their places. Her worn castle cloak is draped over the chair by the tiny desk where she wrote some hasty last-minute notes to the villages' mayors about some small business that had seemed important before. His camp bedding is rolled over neatly in the corner – they were not planning to rest in the place where the Tome of Ilkatzar was going to take them. Her clothes – the wine-red tunic, the grey trousers – are hanging in the wardrobe. Their bed is covered with a blanket, and the blanket is dusty.

Ingrid sits down and smells the dust. She opens the chest by the bed, picks up a shirt – it is his – and presses it to her face. It does not even smell of anything except dust and old age and graveyards. The three years suddenly catch up with her, and she starts to cry.

She never even remembers to build the fire in the fireplace. She cries until she is spent and falls asleep in the cold, desolate room.

In the morning, when Ingrid gathers her companions, old and new ones, in the tavern room, Sir Nevalle arrives. He looks around, raises an eyebrow – Ingrid can clearly see the question "Is that an orc?" in the slight amusement on his face – and chooses to sit down at the table as if he has always belonged. Perhaps he does now.

Introductions are made, questions are answered, brief accounts of the past events are told. Ingrid cannot really believe that both the war with the King of Shadows and the Spirit-Eater curse now seem unimportant to her. Accomplished, sealed and distant. She explains to them that she does not plan to run the keep or command armies. Her only goal is to find her husband – she uses this word in public for the first time and she can see Nevalle's surprise – dead or alive. Khelgar is slightly disappointed, but he manages to conceal it. He really has come a long way with this reluctant leadership.

They all look at Nevalle, with various concerns of how politics can again interfere. Nevalle shrugs and says that nothing changes the fact that she is landed nobility and the keep is hers, but the times are peaceful, the town flourishes, the trading companies fight for a stand in the marketplace, and it may be wise to return to the good old scheme where the Lady of Crossroad Keep and the Captain of Crossroad Keep are two different people.


	7. Luskan

Disclaimer: I own nothing. Last I checked, I did not own Neverwinter Nights, but if anything changes I'll let you know.

* * *

7\. Luskan

It starts all over again. Her companions grow into their new roles and settle down. Khelgar is relieved to forgo the management and command the military. Sand, not without grumbling, establishes the portal with Thay Academy and finds Safiya surprisingly not evil and refreshingly intelligent.

Ingrid starts her search.

She sends messengers, she recruits adventurers in all the allied cities of the coast and farther and offers ten thousand gold for information of Casavir, a paladin of Tyr, missing in action. A talented local monk draws his portraits day and night, and almost two hundred copies are now hanging in all taverns they could reach. Nevalle employs his spies. Ingrid prays and prays for a vision. The mages of Many-Starred Cloaks get a steady river of gold for scrying spells.

And all is in vain. Scrying spells come out blank. Spies cannot dig up a thing. All the clues turn out to be lies, fabrications or rumours instigated by the very fact of the grand search. Her clairvoyance fails her, even though her healing powers are at their highest. Her goddess may be trying to tell her something, but the gods' voices do not get through to Ingrid. The skeptical are deaf to divine prophecies.

A month goes by. Three months pass. Ingrid is possessed. Her good citizens whisper behind her back that she has gone insane. She learns more than she ever needed – of the people who live on this land, of the atrocities committed, of lords and ladies and their servants, of mages and orders, of alliances and betrayals. And nothing about the only person that matters.

Nine months burn in the incessant search, and everything is fruitless until one of the trading company leaders, Sa'sani, introduces Ingrid to her young representative and adventurer, Ray Alminster, who has recently returned from Port Llast. The captain of the Luskan invaders there initially thought they were on the same side and they exchanged some gossip. The rumour goes that a paladin, a hero of Neverwinter, was found in the ruins of Merdelain and taken to Luskan for a trial.

Ingrid is absolutely sure there was no such trial.

The city can truly be called the mother of her misfortunes. Now that they have a clue, she puts on her exotic leathers, takes Arlianda and Tarro, her least conspicuous team, and they travel to Waterdeep, where they find employment as mercenaries on a trading ship that sails to Luskan. They sift through the underbelly of the city. They find the prison healer who treated the paladin's fractures – he was all one broken toy, she says, and Ingrid's heart is bleeding again. They unravel his story thread after thread. They get their hands on a soldier who served in the prison where they kept Casavir. The soldier tells them that the paladin could barely move and when he brought him food he often left the tray out of his reach, and Ingrid loses it. She summons a flame and is about to burn him alive. Arlianda and Tarro exchange a quick look and restrain her.

He is a rascal, she mutters through clenched teeth in their inn room that evening. This is a city of rascals, they point out carefully, we do not believe that you want to burn them all. _What if I do_, she thinks. _What if I do?_

They learn that the paladin was treated, tortured and treated again, there was no consensus if his trial should be public to make a point, then the decision was made that it should not, and the business lost its urgency. A little later a Hosttower mage, sadly deceased now, received a trade offer and the prisoner was sold to a summoned customer from Sigil.

They return to Neverwinter with this strange name right out of fairy tales. How one gets to Sigil is beyond Ingrid. She is not even sure anything mentioned in the ancient tomes has a grain of truth to it. The City of Doors. The Capital of the Outlands. Forty million inhabitants of five hundred different species. A city where streets go up into the sky and fold upon themselves. Every mage she contacts tells her that if a human was taken to Sigil this human is as good as dead. A paladin of Tyr in that damned place will not last a day. The story runs that the gods themselves do not dare enter the domain of the mysterious Lady of Pain.

_Lady of Pain as a mayor_, Ingrid thinks bitterly as they trot through the mud Lord Nasher calls a road, _sounds horrible_. Dreadful thoughts gnaw on her mind. He is alive, and it will soon be four years since she abandoned him to the evil will of their enemies. It was never her choice, and yet she blames her bad luck, her talent to attract misfortunes of the grandest scale.

Back in the keep, she hurries to the library. Sand and Safiya are her best hope, and she barely notices that the two wizards have evidently overcome their professional differences and are more than amicable. They attack the problem like two long-teamed hounds, but their verdict is grim: she will need to make a bargain with a demon or a devil of some high order, and there is no guarantee the summoned creature will not cheat. Also, the Red Wizards who were capable of such a deed were all swiped clean in the fight for power at the Academy, Hosttower mages will not trade with her, and Ammon Jerro disappeared so thoroughly that he is probably in the nine hells paying for his former contracts. If Safiya keeps from saying it is hopeless, Sand does not hesitate to point out that she has a better chance at resurrecting Nolalothcaragascint than getting to Sigil any time soon.

Ingrid nods, says nothing, and piles up all the books on demonology and the outer planes she can find. Sand and Safiya exchange concerned looks behind her back.

In a few days Gann confronts her. He says that she needs to accept the fact that Casavir is beyond her reach. That she needs to sleep. That she has been losing weight again. His heart is still warm towards her, but he will never be able to compete with the man who may or may not be dead. If she is a believer, she will meet her loved one in the afterlife, and before that she must live. She has fifty or sixty years in front of her. She cannot spend that much time in this state. Ingrid regards him silently, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen with tears, her complexion pale as that of a ghost. Gann begs her to respond.

"You are right." She says so quietly that he can hardly hear.

That night Ingrid lies in her bed and thinks of his words. Sweet Gann, in a way he is so innocent that he does not hear himself. He will be a very gentle, tender lover. To someone. He is right: she _is_ a believer, Casavir _is_ beyond her reach, she _cannot_ live fifty more years in this hell, she _is_ going mad and cruel. Tomorrow she will leave for the forest temple and start her vigil, and she will keep on praying and fasting until the gods either respond or claim her life, and then she will learn the truth one way or another.

* * *

In the morning she manages to eat a bowl of fruit to sustain herself for the road, but her mind is already at the temple. She puts on her grey priestly robes, strokes her holy symbol embroidered under the tight neckline and feels the serenity that says her decision is looked upon benevolently. On the way to the gates a young guard barely out of his teens says something to her, and Ingrid does not even understand that he is addressing her. The guard blushes, blocks her way and repeats that her little bard, Jenkins, has been looking for her.

Ingrid almost leaves for the temple anyway, but after a second thought she asks where she can find the bard. She is guilty of not even thinking of Jenkins once since they returned. The guard directs her to Deekin's shop.

Ah yes, she guesses Jenkins has finally met his favourite author in person.

Ingrid picks up her skirts and takes the short way through the stables. Horses prick up their ears, sniff the air and snort softly as she passes by the troughs. Deekin's shop is already open, bluish smoke curls above the chimney – reptiles, they like warmth, Ingrid thinks absently through the peaceful haze that encompasses her mind. She enters the salesroom, a soft bell rings above the door, and it is so reminiscent of church bells that Ingrid is caught up in her reverie and does not even listen to what the halfling bard and the kobold bard tell her excitedly in two similar voices with bad grammar and too much enthusiasm.

"What did you say?" She wills her attention into focus again.

"I say you really should read this book of Deekin's." Jenkins slaps his hips in a storm of feeling. "Deekin traveled with a tielfling. The tiefling was born in Sigil."

Ingrid shifts her gaze to the kobold slowly, as if hesitant to gain hope again.

"Deekin not quite sure Goatman knows the way there. But he says once he knows a marilith who knows portal keys to here." Deekin explains timidly. "Deekin's letter to Waterdeep will find Boss. Boss and Goatman are _always_ together."


	8. The Knight's Goblet Inn, Leilon

Disclaimer: I own nothing in this world; my very conscience is a ridiculous by-product of evolution, probably not intended for fanfiction writing at all. Neverwinter Nights is owned by BioWare, at least I think so.

* * *

8\. The Knight's Goblet Inn, Leilon

Whatever expectations Ingrid has built up ahead of meeting the Glorious Hero of Waterdeep, Slayer of The Archdevil, Resurrected Soul and the Light of Cania, they are ruined the moment when Jayne Groves enters the common room of the Knight's Goblet Inn, hits her head against the angled support beam and erupts into the longest and most creative string of curses Ingrid has ever heard. Coming from a native of West Harbour, this can really be considered an achievement.

Jayne is a tall muscular woman in her prime, in her mid-forties or so, with a sword half her size behind her back. She gives a sheepish grin to the company present, and Ingrid smiles at her warmly, conveying that the swearing does not mortify her in the least. Jayne reads her smile correctly and grins for real, and Ingrid immediately decides she is going to like the older woman. She has dressed up for the occasion and now feels slightly out of place with her soft grey dress and silver pins that hold her recently dyed hair in an elegant bun.

The Hero of Waterdeep, etc. is followed by an impressively tall and broad red-haired man, no, a tiefling. Valen, as Ingrid tries to repeat in her mind to get rid of the 'goatman' word she has picked up from Deekin's book, sweeps through the room with an assessing look and relaxes at the sight of the bard. The kobold assaults Jayne with a fierce hug on the level of her hips and an ear-piercing scream of joy. He proceeds with quite ridiculous introductions.

"Boss, this is Lady Captain, she has a castle, and this is her blue friend Gann, this one. Lady Captain, this is Boss and Goatman."

"Valen," Jayne corrects pleasantly. "His name is Valen. I'm Jayne. Deekin wrote that you need help rescuing a paladin from Sigil. He also honoured you with the highest recommendation of his, namely: 'she is not stupid'. These two sentences seemed to be in conflict, so we grew curious."

They all sit down and the innkeeper himself brings them ale, tea and some 'light refreshments'. He has also driven away the curious citizens of Leilon that have gathered to assess the strangers. Ingrid recounts the short version of the story in a calm, detached voice. She is glad she does not choke once. The worst days of her weakness are gone, and she is back in her element again.

Jayne and Valen share a long look that probably qualifies as a whole conversation among those who have been together for twenty years. Ingrid folds her hands in her lap and waits patiently.

"It looks like we are going with you." Valen says finally. He is frowning slightly. The crease between his dark red eyebrows looks well-established, as if it fits into a long-worn path.

"I would appreciate your help, but you do not have to. I need to know how to get there, that is all. Everyone keeps telling me it is either dangerous or impossible." Ingrid inclines her head politely.

Jayne shrugs.

"The impossible is what we do for life, girl. You and your companions will need Valen with you, and there is no way I'm staying behind. Besides, rescuing a paladin is like rescuing a kitten, lots of goodness points with the gods or whoever counts. So, if you accept our help, how many are going?"

"You two are warriors, and I will provide some magic." Gann volunteers quietly, and Ingrid smiles at him gratefully. "With Ingrid's skills, the four of us will be a well-rounded group."

Jayne considers him for a moment and evidently comes to a satisfying conclusion. She turns to Ingrid.

"And you are..?"

"Well, I can be a decent hit sorceress if need be." Ingrid replies modestly. "But I rather prefer healing."

"Boss, she burns dozens of skeleton folk with one blast. She is wicked!" Deekin grins. "And travel with a healer is sooo nice."

"You are telling me." Jayne rubs her shoulder absently, and Ingrid cannot help wondering what injury she is recalling. "Four of us, then. And just to clarify a point: how much are we going to be paid for this insane mission?"

"Whatever you may want?" Ingrid suggests gingerly. She has never employed adventurers of this grand reputation and does not know if naming a price would offend anyone.

"Let me see." Jayne purses her lips in mock thinking. "What do you have?"

Ingrid does some mental arithmetic and is about to open her mouth when Deekin pulls Jayne by her sleeve.

"Booooss," the kobold drawls disapprovingly. "Stop having fun, or Lady Captain here will give you her castle, and Deekin needs the castle to keep standing in one place."

Jayne laughs.

"Right. Let's say, we need provision, travel and equipment covered, some spare cash on the way and... How about a room for us under your roof when this exciting trip is over?"

"A room... Sure." Ingrid is momentarily confused. Jayne notices again. It seems that nothing escapes her, and she proceeds to clarify.

"We have been thinking about settling down. All this wandering around starts to get old. I am more than ready for my own bed, regular meals and all that."

Ingrid nods.

"Where shall we find the portal and when can we leave then?" She wills herself to stay seated.

"We do not need to look for a portal, we need to make one." Valen says, deep in thought. "Well, we would not want to carve the portal right in the tavern. Who knows what monster may decide to investigate a fresh opportunity? But any isolated place will do. Also, there are preparations to be done. Information is a commodity in Sigil, that is why you will need to get ready to pay in something valuable. Jewels will be easier to carry than gold. "

Ingrid nods and starts taking notes. Deekin has been scribbling wildly, but his writing is probably not a list.

"Besides, we will need supplies, they say food is awful in the planes." Jayne breaks in. "Equipment, spare straps, potions, towels..."

"Towels." Ingrid echoes absent-mindedly and adds them to the list. Jayne slaps her hip.

"Northerners. Can't get a joke when they see one. Relax, we don't need any special towels."

If Gann gives the seasoned adventurer a dramatic eyeroll, Ingrid just quirks an eyebrow and adds a few points to the list herself. Deekin's book to read during long evenings on the way. Aloud.

"Will you need any special ingredients to make a portal to Sigil?" She inquires after a moment.

"Finding the way to Sigil is the easiest part if this is the hilt of the notorious githianki silver sword I see in that atrocity of a sheath. You have a tiefling here who knows the place, you give him the sword and he cuts through the astral fabric of planes or whatever it is called in your fancy wizard's vocabulary. You could do it yourself if you had been in the place before."

Soaking this information up is taking some time, but Valen picks up Jayne's line of thought without a pause.

"Finding a human in Sigil, on the other hand... If he was sold to a summoned devil or demon, it was not leisurely shopping. Humans are generally not seen in those lands as very fierce or long-lasting slaves and paying handsomely for only one man looks like this was personal. Abysmal creatures are not normally that motivated by anything except greed, lust, or revenge." Valen frowns for a moment. "I think we can safely start with the idea of revenge. Now, if he is a paladin, it was not unlikely for him to piss off a powerful Sigil citizen of infernal or abyssal origin. We will need the list of all the contacts with otherworldly creatures your company might have had, and then narrow it down to those who paid him any attention... But I see that you are already thinking of a name, Lady Ingrid."

Ingrid is very pale. She is distracted from the corrosive thought that she could have done without a year's trip across the continent by the sudden realization that there was, indeed, a very powerful succubus who paid their paladin very special attention.

"Blooden." As soon as the name is off her lips, she sees that Valen's jaw tightens and relaxes deliberately. He does not want her to worry. He does not know yet that despite her carefully arranged locks and her modest silver-grey dress with three petticoats she is no delicate flower. _Right_, her inner voice pipes in sarcastically, _says the woman who has recently cried herself to the brink of church-approved suicide_.

"This is not a very well-known name, but not unheard of in the context of slave trade. Some specific kinds of slave trade. Umm, she is…" He starts discreetly. Ingrid straightens her back and decides she needs to know the full version without him dancing around the issue.

"She is a succubus, I know. The bitch trades in bedslaves, you mean?" To her surprise, Valen blushes to the roots of his hair. Jayne shoots an amused look in his direction, and mouths either "he's a prude" or "he is cute" to Ingrid. Despite the gravity of her mood, Ingrid cannot but find such childishness endearing, if confusing. When Jayne gives her a crooked smirk, she realizes that the older woman has caught up on her dread and is trying to distract her.

"She does, among other things. Her main trade, however, focuses on Traaz, a mix of a gladiator arena and an execution row. Basically, they take criminals convicted to death and let them fight a gladiator. If the criminal wins, he or she, or it, for that matter, will win their freedom. If the gladiator wins, they will face another criminal next time. The betting is wild, and the arena is brutal. Lady Ingrid, I am afraid that no one would have lasted that long..." Valen pauses and stares at her strange grimace. Everybody does.

Ingrid's face reflects torment at war with relief. She tugs at her collar that is suddenly too tight to breathe.

"Thy hand will strike true, for I name you a paladin of Tyr, Lord of Justice." She quotes slowly, and her voice is ringing. "He _is_ alive. Oh gods, but _he is alive_."


	9. Sigil

Disclaimer: I own nothing, and this is an awful chapter with too many triggers. Proceed with caution.

* * *

9\. Sigil.

Casavir's world is very dark. Dark and hopeless. No ray of sun enters it, and there is no sun in Sigil anyway, they say. His cell is deep under the Greater Pit of Traaz, and the guards of the gladiators' block do not bother with lamps. Not for him. What use would that be?

He lies on his long narrow bedshelf and tries to remember what good things look like. Grass under the sun. The colourful windows of the temple in the chapterhouse where he grew up. The glorious volcanic landscapes of Mount Galadrim. He wishes he had spent a little more time looking around while they were travelling.

He tugs at his collar. The metal does not only show that he is a thing, bought and owned. It is also cursed with a geas that makes him fight when the mistress gives a clap. In the arena, it starts to burn, it leaks poison into his mind, and the drums roar in his ears louder and louder until he is in the middle of a fight, and all reason is for later.

* * *

The portal spits them out in the trading district where they are less conspicuous. Valen guides them through the narrow streets of the enormous city. Ingrid tries not to stare. Towers spiral at impossible angles, houses climb one another, doors high above the ground are joined with unsteady bridges. There is no sky: there is some strange shimmering fog above their heads, and through this fog one can see countless spirals of other towers hanging down from other, toppled streets. There is too much of everything: carts, stalls, boxes, doors, windows, stairs, fences, street shrines of some quaint kind. They navigate through the crowds. They see fiends, imps, yuan-ti, lots of people, and lots of creatures she struggles to name. The citizens trade and bargain, quarrel and kiss in corners, eat something fried and spitted – the awful-smelling meat looks like something she can only describe as 'tiny gargoyles on a stick'. Here and there steam rises from burning holes in the ground; now and then streams of city filth cross their way. Gann walks in front of her, and his shoulders look so rigid that she is almost tempted to give him a reassuring touch, but she does not: she should not fuel his infatuation. For a moment, she feels very small and helpless in the great sea of Sigil.

However, inns are alike all over the world. They rent rooms at a decent one. In the evening, they work through the details of their disguise. Ingrid will pose as a powerful mage who is looking for entertainment abroad. She will host a private party for upper class gamblers and betters and learn about Blooden and the arena. Gann will be her bodyguard and entourage, and during the day he will hang out in taverns and gather what he can from some drunken bigmouth. Valen decides that he will pose as her local friend and guide. Jayne could have been Ingrid's maid, but they all agree that Jayne and Valen need a logical reason to roam the streets together, so, after a profound fit of laughter, Jayne suggests that it is her turn to pretend to be Valen's servant. Valen blushes once again.

Preparations don't take long. They learn that the closest pit show will be in two days, so right in the morning, after some hasty shopping, Valen hires a palanquin fit for a person of her assumed position. When Ingrid appears in the doorway of the inn, Gann suddenly finds himself out of breath. Her face is an unfamiliar mask of slight contempt, generally directed at the world she finds lacking. Her ornate black robe is cascading off her shoulders, and underneath there is a flow of gentle scarlet silk, layers and layers of transparent fabric that conceal and hint at the same time. Ingrid beckons him to help her into the palanquin – her hand is heavy with rings of power – and gives him a cold glare that promises death when he is slow to oblige. She is playing her role so well that his flesh creeps. There is no doubt that this person would enjoy a death show at the arena.

* * *

Twice a week Casavir wakes up to the sound of drums. This means it is the show day, and soon someone mute, invisible in the darkness, only hands and breath, will be in his room to help him with his armour. Once his whole room starts to shake, he grabs his hammer and takes a deep breath. His shield is tied to his maimed arm, and he must hold the hammer in his left one. The floor starts to rise slowly. The sounds of a million voices merge into a deafening roar, he feels the wind on his face and smells blood.

He kills another fiend, and sometimes one more, or two more, and then the crowds shout cheers or obscenities at him, the platform moves back down, the room fills with some sickeningly sweet gas and he is lost in his nightmares again. The gas is poisonous; he will cough his lungs out for a day after the show, and coughing hurts as hell. On worse days even breathing sends jolts of pain into his backbone, and coughing is mere agony.

After the fight he always wakes up on his bedshelf, no weapon and no armour. They never make the mistake of giving him a chance to keep his weapon. They also do not let him speak with anyone. Not since his first and last attempt at organizing a riot when he managed to lead a dozen or so of the gladiators almost to the surface. All but him were killed brutally. He was the only one too valuable to dispose of, the demoness said that day.

* * *

They hire a private parlour with three adjacent rooms at a luxurious place near the pits. The colonnade of the arena dominates the area. Every time Ingrid looks out of the window, its dark polished stone is there as a reminder of fates more abhorrent than death. She gives herself a moment to think of the possibilities. Is he there? Is he there right now? Or is he dead, long dead and buried nameless in the mass grave near the smooth black wall of that awful building? Her mind travels back into the past, to visit all the people who are dead because of her. She shudders and leaves her room.

They all go to a very fancy slave market where Ingrid picks her prey. She sits on low pillows near the stage and treats some of the supposed fellow customers of the similar statute to lazy conversations. She can almost hear the surprise of her companions when she utters racist, prejudiced, cruel remarks with stunning precision. Well, she has heard enough of them to be able to imitate them to perfection. She invites several rich patrons to a private party she is going to host in her suite in the evening. People, most of them – her pretend racism should not only extend to slaves. Four is enough – those who have been in Sigil for a long time, those who go to the arena shows regularly, those who demonstrate competence in judging the fighters paraded on the stage.

Underneath her perfect coldness she is screaming. The world is a cruel, corrupted place. Everywhere she has ever travelled she has seen the same: males and females, adults and children treated as filth, as prey, as meat. Disease and disfigurement, violence and savagery, rape and murder, poverty, starvation and death. Fates are broken in the meat grinder of slavery; power is abused to the point of terror. She rescues one person, and twenty more sink into nothingness behind her.

Ingrid catches the eye of another slave on the stage. He is a young boy, already tall and muscular, and very pretty. There is a defiant look in his green eyes. The merchant launches into a long tale how great this item is, and Ingrid thinks that she can afford the preposterous price. She could buy the boy, take him to the Sword Coast with them, release him, give him a job. The merchant would accept her money and finance a raid of another village in the mortal plane to bring another handsome young boy to the predatory attention of rich bastards. Nobody raises a hand – the price is too high, and a sad elven woman steps into the stage next. She is a tailor, and lovely, and will last for a century. Ingrid stares at the wine in her glass. How many of these slaves are paraded here today? How many are paraded here every year? How many stages like this are there in the planes? How can she choose one of the millions of the unfortunate? The Wall of the Faithless looms over her mind. The screams of the dead in that plane are nothing compared to the screams of all who suffer alive. The awful gods are flesh of the awful world's flesh.

Ingrid does not raise her hand once.

* * *

Casavir got lost in the darkness. He remembers that the halls were collapsing behind them, and Khelgar dragged Ingrid's unconscious body ahead of him, through the doorframe he was trying to hold on his shoulders. Then there were the gargoyles, and he saw them swoop down at Khelgar and grab Ingrid, and suddenly he was on his knees, struggling to throw the slabs off his back and then he was crushed. Very vaguely, he remembers light, voices and somebody's face above him. He wanted to move and could not feel anything. He asked the rescuer about his friends; the rescuer hit him, and everything went black again.

The next time he came to his senses, he was in that basement cell in Luskan. He could not move a limb, it hurt to breathe, and they kept asking questions. He did not have the answers. He cannot say how long he was there. He learnt to move again, to walk again, to sit again. The prison of his own weak body was keeping him inside more effectively than any prison people could invent. He remembers he spent hours staring at the mould on the walls and praying that Ingrid was safe. He failed her. His heart howled with his inability to be at her side.

His heart still howls, but there are many reasons. A man never knows what will break him. He was restrained, tied and chained, and then delivered to the portal where the succubus's predatory face shimmered in the halo of unnatural scarlet light. Blooden was circling around him like a vulture, mocking him, taunting him, and he was too disgusted to think. When she told him that he was going to fight for her income and pleasure, to fight in the arena, he was strangely relieved. He thought that he was going to die soon. How could he hope to triumph over fiends, his spine having been broken into a dozen pieces? Yet here he was, and that was not the thing that made him descend into despair. The magic of the collar made him fight, the magic of the arena made his opponents lose, but Tyr stayed with him and lent holy power to his strikes. For a time, he prayed that he would be matched against an innocent, and the arcane forces of the arena would make him lose. That he would die.

Nevertheless, that never happened. The fights went on and on and on.

* * *

It is the night before the pit show, and their suite is full of guests, attracted by the wealth and the power they smell in the hostess. Ingrid listens to the conversations, sips at the exquisite vintage in her crystal glass slowly and wears yet another mask – the polite amusement of a cruel woman spoilt beyond the point of no return. The inner stream of her thought takes in several voices at the same time, and she files away everything that might be of use. When the conversations float away from the only topic she needs, she gently redirects them back. The arena's walls look so heavy, when was it constructed? What if some of the gladiators were enhanced magically – isn't that cheating? What if their owners wanted to get rid of competition – is it possible for them to sneak up on the others' gladiators somewhere and poison them? Oh, they are all kept underneath the arena, who keeps watch over fair play then?

The longer she listens, the more she wants to just stand up, go outside and burn this wretched city to the ground. She looks out of the window at the macabre black walls and aches to tear them down.

Later in the night, when the guests have finally had enough wine to feel like leaving, their small company gathers in her room to discuss what they found out. Not much. Nobody mentioned the name of Casavir, or any paladin at all. They fight under arena names, Ingrid says tiredly. We will have to go there tomorrow and watch all the carnage, from morning till night.

Valen pays a dear price for prestigious seats, very close to the ground. They can see the carnage well enough indeed. Man after man, beast after beast falls, their guts are cleaned hastily between the fights. Blood soaks the sand, and pools in the footprints. None of the gladiators look like the man they are searching for, and not many of them even resemble humans in the first place. A large horned devil passes by and accepts stakes on the fights. Ingrid's face is unreadable as she drops a sapphire into his box with an indifferent hand.

The show is nearing its peak, the criminals are becoming bigger and fiercer, the gladiators are having longer records, the stakes are growing higher and higher. The stalls have been filled to the brim over the day. Gann can smell a hundred infernal scents, and he is sure Ingrid must be itching in the presence of so many fiends and so much evil.

The last fight of the day is between a legion devil accused of mass murder in the streets of Sigil and a gladiator listed as The Cripple. Despite the name, the stakes are highly in favour of the outcome that gladiators shall win against criminals in this round. The pit shakes with the roar of the crowds when the huge, tall, broad-chested, winged legion devil enters the arena through the narrow gate on the left. The sand in the centre shifts and sinks. A platform rises from within its depths, and on the platform, there is a human, so small in this enormous place.

Ingrid's heart skips a beat.

* * *

The darkness is what will break him in the end, Casavir thinks waiting for the drums to declare the ruthless show.

Victory after victory, he survived the first season, and Blooden was pleased. Casavir shudders at the memory. She kept coming and evidently enjoyed taunting him, talking about him as if he were a piece of meat. He closed his eyes, he tried not to listen. She was telling him of her ideas, more blood and carnage in the arena, more fame and money, more spectacular ways to display her gladiators' strength and ferocity. Her voice was growing lustful, and at the end she always said that she would find it very satisfying to kill him herself, but his death was going to be one of those grand moments when the spectators fall into complete awed silence and then rock the planes with their uproar.

When he survived the second season and, in the closing fight, a balor fell at his hand, the screams of the crowd rose to a clamour. He was standing in the middle of the stage, his knees buckling with strain, and thousands yelled that he was invincible, that there was no chance for criminals to win their freedom anymore, that it was unfair, that he was to be released or killed. A wall rose behind him, chains sprang up to the links in his collar and bound him. Blooden appeared in the arena, her maroon dress revealing more than concealing, her bloodred claws raised in triumph. A cambion with an axe was following at her heels. The crowds grew insane smelling blood in the air, and Casavir prayed for Tyr to grant him a quick death, but Blooden had a very different plan.

Casavir often relives that moment in his nightmares. Blooden announces that the Maimed God of Toril perhaps gives unfair advantage to her favourite gladiator, and she is ready to give them all better chances at victory. Let us see next season, she screams at the top of her voice, if any of you, lawbreakers and outlaws, bandits and thieves and other scum, will have the guts to defeat a maimed servant of a maimed god. With these words the cambion hands her the axe, she turns to Casavir, and chops his right hand off. Despite himself, he screams with pain. Blooden cups his face tenderly, stares into his eyes one last time and claws them out.

* * *

Ingrid watches the fight silently, and Gann watches her. Her hands are clenched together, and she hides them in her mantle. Her face is seemingly emotionless, but the shaman knows better.

The man in the arena is blind; his head perks up as if he is listening for movement around. His motions are slow and careful, as if his light armour still weighs too much, and he holds his hammer in his left hand. The legion devil towers over his tiny figure and launches at him with his enormous sword. By some miracle, the blind man jerks away from the blade that could chop him in two and its edge only brushes his shoulder above the shield before biting into the sand. The man touches his shoulder. Blood streams from his fingers. With a visible effort, he raises both the hammer and the shield, and silver light of divine magic washes over him. The devil gives a deafening cry, and the man throws himself sideways in case this is an attack. The ground is treacherous, he loses his footing, and as he rolls over awkwardly, the devil drops his sword to throw himself forward and pin the man's small frame to the ground.

The crowds roar, and many of the spectators jump to their feet. The man drives an elbow into the attacker's throat and manages to wriggle his left arm free when the devil touches his own neck involuntarily. This split second is enough for the gladiator to jerk his shining hammer up and direct a desperate strike at the devil's head. A sickening crack of a skull resonates off the high stone walls that engulf the arena, the devil claws at the opponent's armour trying to get to his neck, his chest, anything, but his movements become erratic and slow down until his body collapses under the weight of death. Bleeding red and covered in the almost black devil blood, the man props himself up on his elbow and crawls from under the carcass of the defeated murderer. His whole body shakes with exhaustion.

The square area under him starts to sink down into the depths under the pit. Ingrid follows its descend with an intense gaze. She straightens in her seat and Gann can see that her shoulders are taut as a bow string.


	10. Sigil, the Court of Pain

Disclaimer: I don't own Neverwinter Nights, and I'm saddened by this fact.

* * *

10\. Sigil. The Court of Pain

Ingrid does not need to turn to Gann to know that he is aching to ask her if she is all right, and even Jayne and Valen give her hesitant looks to estimate whether she is in too much turmoil. There is no time for this. The rich in the front rows do not seem in a hurry to leave so far, but the game of power is on, and she needs to carve into it and cut a few new guests for her evening party out of their usual cliques. An indifferent glance, a ghost of interest in the direction of a dark bearded man whose eyes have been straying to her now and then, a lazy question sent into the air when another slaver in silks and furs at the same time passes by, and they flock to her like little sparrows to breadcrumbs. Ingrid chooses cleverer ones this time: her questions are going to be much more specific. She has already made a mental list of about twenty, and she is itching to get to the palanquin and write them down. How does one spirit away a star gladiator from the most guarded place in the city? Possible plans scatter in her mind like beads off a broken string.

They have less than half an hour to make quick orders and change before the guests arrive. Wine is a river, the hostess is all velvet, and her laughter is silver bells in their ears; the conversation soon becomes a competition of wit. Ingrid shepherds it into wilder and wilder hypotheses, and the guests are so drunk that they start discussing the ways to covertly kill the Cripple. Ingrid listens with a predatory smile on her lips, and sometimes raises an eyebrow at some completely nonsensical idea of how to get into the depths of the Greater Pit. Let the drunken party ask the questions she should not pronounce.

When the last guest is half-carried away by his slaves and the four of them are finally alone, Ingrid rises to her feet, casts a spell to cleanse poison and walks to a washbasin in the small alcove to vomit quietly. She returns completely sober and cuts into the problem right away.

"I believe there is no way for us to get into the gladiators' quarters." She states in a calm voice. "They are guarded against competitors. Too many guards, too many levels, no map, probably magical circles of protection and no good pretext to enter openly." She talks them through her notes right as she takes them. She can see no fault in the way the arena is protected from intrusions.

"I can be sold as a gladiator." Valen suggests after a long pause, and Ingrid can see how difficult these words are for him. His tail is twitching, and Jayne touches his wrist reassuringly.

"If I give you my sword, you enter the ring under the collar of that dog Katarro or Malen… There is very little chance you will have the sword, Casavir, and the opportunity to carve the portal at the same time. I will have to be close to will the sword into obedience. Training and testing will take a month at best… No. This is too unreliable and too long." Ingrid hesitates if she should say what she thinks because it may be seen as manipulation, but honesty takes over. "He will have eight chances to die during that month, and… you saw him."

She lets them do the talking, because an idea dawns on her suddenly. As she runs through her notes again, this vague idea takes shape, tightens into a plan and is born. She takes a minute to stare out of the window before speaking, afraid that the plan might be an illusion of her tired mind. She has had those moments of ringing clarity before when a decision seemed brilliant at night, but turned out to be complete nonsense in the morning.

"You know," Ingrid says, measuring her words slowly. "Criminals accused of most atrocious crimes are subjected to expedited trials in this city. Such criminals are brought into the arena with their own weapons."

Jayne raises her eyebrows.

"Great. Now one of us needs to commit a most atrocious crime, and then fight a god-favoured paladin under hostile mind magic. Even if Valen makes a portal right in plain sight of the amazed public, there is a really high risk that he won't be able to drag your kicking husband into it."

"No, Valen will not." Ingrid unsheathes the Sword of Gith and weighs it in her hands. "I will do it. I will be able to defeat him without killing him."

"Are you sure?" Valen and Gann ask at the same time. Valen's voice is calm, while Gann's is full of emotion.

"I know him." Ingrid answers simply. "I know the way he wields his hammer and the powers he invokes. I dare to hope that he will recognize me. As for the crime, there will be no difficulty with that. Right now, I feel like burning this whole city might only improve the landscape." Valen's expression tightens, and Ingrid understands his anger. She probably should not tell him that ten minutes earlier her best plan was to commit several ritual murders, start the rumour mill, bring Blood Wars to the streets of Sigil and wait for an opportunity the chaos will inevitably present. Also, she should never tell him that her main consideration against this plan was not the collateral loss of life, but rather respect for the mysterious someone who has crafted the perfect balance in a city with so much potential for trouble. Ingrid has an eye for such things, and she harbours no illusion that this balance may be a natural state. The city has a pattern, its streets are narrow and winding on purpose. She can bet that if she wanted to start a tavern here, she would need a permit, and the permit would carefully place her establishment in between more troublesome neighbours. The very idea of arena justice is but a neat way to escape responsibility: a criminal who is dead was just weak, not executed by some prejudiced judge of the wrong race, species or reputation. She realizes that everybody is waiting for her to continue and shakes the thought off.

"There are innocents here, however few. It must be a building. Some symbolic monument, for me to be charged with sacrilege. I would attempt to tear the arena apart, but we need it standing for the show. Any suggestions?"

Jayne sends an inquiring look at Valen, and the tiefling paces in thought. They all wait.

"The court," He says slowly. "The court is in the same building with the prison. They are mostly empty because inmates either pay the city or go to the arena."

"Perfect. And nobody will delay my trial if there is no court to host it." Ingrid works out a deep ache that has settled between her shoulder-blades. "There are several other things we need to arrange before that."

* * *

The morning is gloomy, and the streets are veiled in mist. Ingrid walks to the tall gate of the Court of Pain and stops. The mansion is impressive; its facade is the same polished black stone, its colonnade is decorated with statues and bas-reliefs that depict creatures of all sorts – screaming, tortured, dying. She spares a moment to stare at them before she takes a deep breath and throws five blood-red rubies on the pavement around her. A sleepy soldier shouts a question, but before he and the other guards can realize what she is doing, a roaring wall of crimson fire surrounds her and seals her spell circle from their intrusion.

Ingrid raises her arms in a wide arc. Needles of pain dig into her flesh and the air suddenly tastes weird – the time itself slows down; the very core of the Weave reveals itself. Ingrid chants and chants and pays no attention to the web of ghostly threads that crawl up her arms and extend into the air, into the heart of all this stone, into the depths of the ground. It must be taking some time, because the voices outside the wall of fire grow numerous and loud. They are trying to get to her, but she is too deep in her incantation to care. It is magic that holds this mansion together, that keeps the streets of this city propped up into each other in this quaint space between the planes, and magic can tear this monumental building down like a house of cards. She is no wizard to understand the math behind the magic, but intuition and raw power guide her flawlessly through its intricate knots. She bites at her lip and spits blood on the ground. The arcane net has taken roots in the fabric of matter, and now it swells with the power of her blood until her limbs grow heavy. She takes a glance at the rubies: they are almost dead and depleted, and the wall of fire is about to fade.

Ingrid waits until the flames around her go dim and pulls all the threads at once in an abrupt, precise motion.

For a short moment, the force that holds the stones together is completely negated, and the building collapses upward, the columns break into a myriad of pieces that rise in the air and fall up into the sky. It is but a split second, so the mansion does not fall into the streets folding up on themselves high above them. Ingrid lets the force go, and the whole building settles down into a mountain of rubble and debris.

Bishop would have been so proud of her. He had always considered her priestly path a waste of talent. Ingrid lets the spell die above her palms and collapses in exhaustion. Dark figures, hundreds of them, advance at her from the dust and mist. All of the city guard must be here.

* * *

Screams and roar in the distance indicate that Ingrid is completing that awful spell they had devised together. Gann shifts so that his muscles get a different pattern of blood flow and waits some more. More guards run clinking past his lair behind a stock of boxes at the entrance to a small alley. He caresses the fletching of the arrow he keeps at the ready. His face clouds at the thought of Ingrid alone and weakened in front of that building. What will prevent her from being executed on the spot? She seemed so confident two nights before, and that confidence was contagious, but isn't the whole plan suicidal? The image of her dead body pinned to the ground by swords flashes across his mind. The image lingers, and his gut roils.

He perks up at the sound of heavy footsteps and a palanquin creaking. He hates that his thoughts are straying even at this crucial moment. If Blooden recognizes Ingrid before the pit show, the succubus will never let her be matched against the paladin.

The arrow finds its mark. It sinks into the pale throat of the succubus, and Gann sees the winged lady in the palanquin gasp, grasp at the arrow and try to pull it out. The arrowhead and the shaft are heavily enchanted, and the holy wood burns her fingers. The slaves stop and the palanquin is lowered to the ground. The dead body of his victim hits the pillows. Gann melts into the shadows of the alley. His part is done.

* * *

In the filthy backroom of yet another shady inn in her life, Jayne keeps her eyes on the portal. One gorgeous diamond on this side of the magical hole between the planes keeps the entrance steady, another gorgeous diamond can be seen on the forest floor on the other side. _Their power will feed the portal for two days_, Ingrid said, sheathing her sword, _make sure you all leave by then._

Jayne licks at her scuffed knuckles and contemplates her strong prejudice against portals and the alarming frequency with which she agrees to be hurled inside out through them. The door creaks open, and Valen shepherds another group of intimidated slaves inside. There are six of them, four girls and two boys. Jayne springs to her feet, gives them a quick survey – they do not seem to be hurt, only scared of her impressive specimen of a tiefling – and repeats her instructions. She has to shove the assembled packs of food and bedding into their hands, for they hesitate to touch her property and probably do not understand a single word. One by one, they step into the portal and hit the forest floor on the other side a couple of seconds later.

This is the last group. The evening before Ingrid divided the remaining jewels into three piles and this pile, the biggest one, has run out now. Forty-two former slaves are camping in the middle of Neverwinter Forest, and she is to chaperone them for the next few days, knowing nothing of what is going on in Sigil. At what point did she sign up for matron duties at a church summer camp?

Jayne curses to herself and steps into Valen's embrace for a quick kiss. She disentangles herself from his arms, wrinkles her nose at the portal, throws her bag on one shoulder and steps into the halo of light. She is very proud she does not hit the ground face-first in front of her new charges.


	11. The Greater Pit of Traaz

Disclaimer: I own nothing. The things I imagine are leaves on the surface of my mind's river; the leaves will sink, the water will flow away, the river will run dry too soon for my liking.

* * *

11\. The Greater Pit of Traaz

In the afternoon of the same day the city is bubbling with rumours that grow more detailed by the hour. The court was disintegrated. The court exploded. An archdevil demolished the court. No, it was a mortal sorceress who summoned the archdevil to bring the court to ruin. Who is that sorceress? The sorceress is a goddess. It was Blooden, nobody saw the Lady of the Pit since the evening before the sacrilege. No, there were three witches. Why the court? Why not?

In the middle of the drunken discussion in one of the taverns in the seedier district, the door opens, and everyone takes in the newcomer. Valen strides to the counter in a deliberate, no-nonsense gait and a heavy pouch of coin hits the wooden surface.

"I want to place a bet." He says in a low growl. "Two hundred on the Mad Witch against the Cripple."

The bartender, a smaller demon, weighs the pouch in his hand and spits on the floor.

"There is no fight like that on the list." He drops the pouch on the counter and pushes it back to Valen reluctantly. Valen stares at him coldly.

"There is now. Two hundred on the Mad Witch against the Cripple."

"The Cripple has not been defeated once." One of the frequenters grunts in the background. Valen smirks and pushes the money back to the bartender.

"This witch had fought a god and killed him. Two hundred on the Mad Witch against the Cripple, damn you."

The bartender gives him a suspicious glare but writes the bet down in his book.

* * *

In a nicer tavern across the city, Gann places a larger bet on the Cripple against the Mad Witch. The crowd at the tavern eyes his back while he is leaving. As the door closes behind him, he hears them erupt into a heated argument and smiles grimly.

* * *

By the end of the day, the betting goes wild. Citizens storm the office at the Pit to place a bet; at every corner there are shouting matches: who has better chances – the Witch who tore the court down single-handedly, or the Cripple who has survived two years in the arena?

* * *

Deep under the pit, Blooden's assistant, a young Tanar'ri with too many problems on his mind, shrugs and crosses the name of another criminal off his list.

* * *

Back in the room dimly lit by the portal, Gann comes back from his reverie and inhales sharply. He props himself up on his elbows and turns to the tiefling to address his silent question.

"She is not hurt. She is asleep in her cell, somewhere underground. Her sword is locked in a chest across the corridor. She demanded my report and kicked me out of her dream immediately. She said she needs to meditate before the fight tomorrow." A shadow of doubt crosses his face. Valen raises an eyebrow at the pause, and after a moment of hesitation Gann continues. "Ingrid also ordered me to tell you that the portal will probably collapse tonight, and we must not stay for her combat under any circumstances even if the portal seems to be stable. If she dies, her magic that feeds it will dissipate, and we will be stuck here indefinitely. If the plan works, there will be no time for us to fight our way to the portal in the arena. The meeting point in the forest is very far away from any settlements, but she cannot wait for half the guard to follow them to Neverwinter."

Valen nods and inclines his head thoughtfully.

"You do not want to abandon her to her own fate." He states calmly and pours some soup he has been making into the bowl for Gann. Gann accepts the bowl and shakes his head angrily.

"Of course I don't want her to be alone a million planes away, Swords of Gith or no Swords of Gith. What if he kills her tomorrow, and we will not even know?"

"She has been through a lot." Valen remarks in the same unfazed manner. "This is her risk to take. Let her go."

"I love her." The young man says between mouthfuls of soup. He stares at the bowl sadly, suddenly not hungry. "I could not let her go when she wanted to cross the continent, I could not let her go when she chose to travel here, and how can I just let her go into that madness now?"

Valen fishes for something in his bag. He picks up a bottle of dark liquid, unscrews the cork and takes an experimental sip. He pushes the bottle into Gann's hands.

"All the more reason for us to leave sooner than later. We do not need you dead and in Sigil because the noble lady who happens to be kind to you wanted to get her husband back. Drink." He orders in a tone of authority that makes Gann remember that the tiefling in front of him indeed commanded armies. "Drink and tell me how you met."

_And when you are pissed enough to pass out,_ Valen thinks grimly, _I will haul you through that fucking portal so that you could hate me and not yourself if all falls apart._

* * *

Ingrid sits straight, her hands modestly clasped together in her lap. The convoy officers outside the cell are discussing her in a language she does not know, but she does not care. She has been meditating and praying silently for the last two days, with brief interruptions from her interrogators, and her mind is as sharp as a needle. The Sword of Gith is in the chest with her belongings opposite her cell. It is vibrating in its sheath, attuned to her will and focus. If she wanted to escape, she could just wish it in her hand, and the shards would slice through the wood, metal, stone and ropes easily. She does not want to escape though, and the sword is masqueraded as a simple blade, so she should not reveal its quality too early even if it sings to her and demands to be released. Luckily, no one looked at it twice, and no person of arcane powers cared to explore it.

A large Tanar'ri demon arrives, and the conversation now flows on in a language she speaks. They are discussing whether they should walk her to the pit naked – whether this will attract more spectators to the arena. Ingrid tunes the conversation out. Whatever they decide, it does not matter. She needs to get to that pit, without clothes or without skin if necessary. She knows now that she can destroy _the city_, and these ridiculous creatures discuss spicing up _the show_. Ingrid's mind wanders into the deeper waters of her memory. _A naked witch costs a fully clothed witch,_ Bishop said once. The man is much easier to put up with when he is long dead. His malice does not even seem that genuine when he is but a ghost.

The Tanar'ri manager notices the smile that threatens at the corner of the witch's mouth. He cringes and has a sudden suspicion that his best plan might be to unlock the cell, kneel and beg for mercy. He shakes it off, but feelings like that should be heeded in some way. Perhaps this is an omen that he should treat her dignity with respect.

"Look at her," He says indifferently. "She is skin and bones. The moment the crowd sees her, they will know she is no fighter. Let her wear the thick robe, at least she will appear mysterious."

As he unlocks her cell, the Tanar'ri demon tries to meet the witch's eyes and judge if his hunch had something to it, but Ingrid looks right through him as if he does not even exist. His infernal aura brushes against her holy one, unfamiliar and alien to him, and the young demon recoils. A new fear grips him: what if this strange criminal is indeed a goddess?

He orders her to walk out of the cell. Ingrid does not notice the reverence in his voice.

* * *

They deliver her into the bowels of the arena in a large closed box. It feels like a coffin for it is inlaid in velvet. The box is moved through numerous narrow corridors and at last its lid opens into a small room of the same black stone. Two slaves help her don her ornate black robe and tie the simple leather sheath with the disguised Sword of Gith to her belt. Another demon reads her the proceedings of the arena – if she defeats her opponent, she will walk free and will not be judged twice for the same crime. Ingrid nods indifferently. In her mind, she is already trying on the spell she is going to release first.

The demon retreats, the whole room shakes, and the ceiling opens. Light floods the room. Ingrid is deafened by the roar above. As the floor rises and rises upwards, Ingrid stands still and takes in the stalls. From this point of view, they are very far, the spectators are so tiny she cannot break the crowd into individuals. Rows and rows of seats climb almost to the dim shimmer that qualifies as the sky here. The ground is covered with sand, and Ingrid's sharpened senses flare at how much death she can feel in this place. Thousands and thousands of deaths. The arena has been soaking up blood for centuries. No wonder Casavir does not die here. This place is a continuous sacrifice to some ancient evil being, and Tyr would not let his champion be slaughtered in its honour.

The magic of the arena swells and presses on her like a slab of rock. _Fight_, the voices of the dead scream in her ears, _fight_. Everything is being covered with a reddish haze, blood pumps madly in her ears, and she turns to face her opponent almost against her will.

Up close, Casavir looks even worse. His eyes are covered with a grey band of cloth, his shoulders are hunched low under the weight of his armour, and holding the hammer evidently gives him pain. His face is concealed by a mask of ash and soot, and Ingrid almost loses it when she sees two cleaner trails on his cheeks. She realizes that he is crying with strain: he is barely holding the heavy shield up. His jaw tightens and he makes a step forward. _Kill him_, the voices of the dead attack her ears, _fight, fight, fight_. There is something else that pulls at her magical core, and Ingrid pretends to yield, follows the impulse and changes the intent desire to cast a fireball into a spell of true vision at the last moment. The roar around them ascends in volume.

Colours swirl in her eyes and suddenly she can see so much more. She is scared that nothing she has been planning is going to work. She did not take this powerful evil magic into account. She and Casavir are two fluttering moths in a giant, wicked spiderweb of the arena. His collar binds him to it, and her arms and legs are entangled in its threads. The arena is urging them to clash, to fight, to die, to spill blood onto the sand. The voices are an incantation that rings in her ears. The more she resists, the worse it presses down on her. She lets her hands crackle with the simplest destructive magic she knows and though she does not need to pronounce the incantation she screams it with all the might of her lungs for him to hear. At the last moment she flicks her wrist to direct the flow of orange fire at the ground in front of him. Casavir jerks to one side, and the spectacular flame leaves him unscathed. The crowd goes mad.

Ingrid lets the arena control her arcane side and repeats her pretend attacks four more times. Her beloved successfully escapes all of them, and they keep him busy so that he has no time to approach and charge at her. At the same time, she summons her divine powers and pulls at different strings around her trying to understand whether this web has a beginning, a core, a key chord. There are too many. They are stuck in this web. She can see the evil magic tighten around Casavir's neck for he did not attack her yet and the arena is _hungry_. With every spell sizzling past him, he gains some ground, and soon he forgoes his defense in order to lunge at her. In a moment of inspiration, she summons a holy shield instead of a spell. Her aura flares up and out like a bursting rosebud and the air around her thickens enough to slow down his hammer. It will still hurt and bruise when it falls on her, but not enough to crush her bones.

The hammer never falls. Casavir inhales the air sharply and his expression changes to horror.

"Ingrid?" He calls out. His arm shakes under the weight and he lowers the hammer slowly, pushes it down against the pull of his magical chains.

"Casavir." Ingrid replies, and a sheen of sweat covers her forehead. This horrible arena is _alive_. It catches up on the change in the fight dynamic and slams all of its powers into the two small humans.

Casavir drops his hammer and falls to one knee under the increased pressure of the magic. The red strings pull at him and his veins pulse with pain. Thousands of dead voices are screaming in their ears.

"I will not fight you." He says through clenched teeth. The magic swirls and groans. "Release me from this fate."

Ingrid unsheathes her sword and wills it to break into a dozen silver pieces. She stops understanding if it is the magic of the arena or the crowd that roars so deafeningly. To her horror, Casavir's collar acquires a molten colour and the smell of burned skin invades her senses. Her will identifies a target for each of the shards and hides her true intention underneath the general direction she orders them to follow. The arena believes she is about to kill the unresisting paladin and does not stop her.

In a storm of swift motion, the shards cut the core strings around Casavir on their way to assembling into the sword that slices through the collar and leaves only a tiny, hair-deep cut on his throat.

He is free.

The whole magical net around them screams and its tendrils retreat in agony. Ingrid sends the shards at them. The Silver Sword of Gith is able to cut ties between worlds, and this arena is a projection of some hungry, cruel interplanar creature. She slashes at the strings until nothing is left of the ancient magic.

Whatever sight the crowd might have expected, they did not expect this. The silver storm returns to the centre of the arena and rearranges into a sword again. The Cripple rises to his feet. The Mad Witch takes his hand, wields her sword to slit a bright, gaping hole in the air and they step into the pool of light that swallows them.

The arena is empty.


	12. Neverwinter Forest

Disclaimer: the things you own, ultimately end up owning you. Good for me that I own nothing. Ingrid is finally getting to the end of her trip, and I know too well what we all face at such arrivals: disappointment.

* * *

12\. Neverwinter Forest

They make slow progress through the forest. The former slaves form the bulk of their procession, many of them are young and tire easily, and four women have babies with them – they were being sold like this, and Valen chose two lives instead of one whenever he could. The tiefling pulls an improvised cart with the supplies from Sigil. Gann scouts and hunts while Jayne leads them, her hand on her sword in case anyone ambushes the strange caravan.

Ingrid walks last, her arm around Casavir's waist. She guides the paladin over tree roots and molehills and just drinks his presence in. He is as taciturn as he has ever been, but there is something else hanging in the air between them that she is afraid to question aloud for now. He responds to her care with a neutral expression on his face, and sometimes, when she strokes his arm, he pulls her closer for a moment and then lets her go as if he should not touch her.

In the evening, Gann is lucky to shoot a deer, and they set camp early. Unusual – and good – food makes the freed folk brighten up, and Ingrid uses this chance to sit down with some of them and try several languages in search of the one they might recognize. Most of those she manages to talk to did not even understand they were not slaves anymore. Two of them are elves, captives from that war in Cormanthor; they had been to Rashemen before, and she gets Gann sit with them by the fire. At last, she returns to her own modest dinner, and before long Jayne plops down next to her and snorts ungracefully at the contents of her bowl.

"You never eat meat." The adventurer remarks with a friendly poke into Ingrid's ribs. "You do not happen to be a closet druid on top of all this magic, do you?"

Ingrid looks around to see if everyone is far enough. She does not want to ruin their appetite or the light mood of the evening. She answers quietly, so that only Jayne can hear.

"I have burnt enough flesh to know that we all smell alike when cooked." She wills a small fireball into existence and lets it die above her palm. "I struggle to find meat appealing."

Ingrid's eyes are drawn to Casavir, who is having his meal in some distance from them. His hand freezes halfway in the air and he lowers it down slowly. He could not hear her answer, but he must remember it. Jayne wrinkles her nose.

"I hate it that you always have a reason for everything you do, and it is usually some awful reason." She follows Ingrid's gaze to the paladin and the lines in her face soften. "He will come around, you know. Give him some time. He has never been the one to need assistance, it must be hard for him to accept sacrifices, not offer them."

Ingrid is suddenly very tired. She closes her eyes and lets Jayne pull her into a patronizing, with a slight touch of 'motherly', but very welcome hug.

* * *

Surprisingly, Casavir accepts Gann's help much easier than hers. Whether that is because Gann is a man and it relieves her modest paladin's embarrassment or because they have no history, Ingrid cannot say. She lets them sit and talk quietly without her during rests, averts her eyes when Gann walks her love, _her husband_, into the woods when necessary, and tries not to be conspicuously bitter when Casavir falls back into the habit of calling her 'my lady'.

The night before they are out of the forest, Ingrid takes the first watch. The people around her settle down and everything quiets. Despite her will, she is again distracted by the way Casavir gets ready for sleep. He takes off the soft band that covers his eyes, folds it carefully and puts it into the small pouch he wears on a string around his neck. He does not lie back in a normal way – his back must be hurting him, so he presses his lips into a thin line, falls on his side slowly, awkwardly, his face twitching in the process, and then rolls over on his back. For a while, he breathes in and out steadily, and then his arm searches for the edge of the blanket. He covers himself and his stern expression slowly relaxes.

Ingrid looks away. Her heart beats so aggressively that her ribs groan, and the big bone in the middle of her chest aches. She feels very small, stupid, vulnerable. As if her skin is covered with cracks and her life force leaks. What is happening to her? The night is peaceful, and the forest smells are comforting. She walks the perimeter of the camp to calm down, and the soft pine needles give in pleasantly under her feet. A barn owl hoots in the distance. She tries to abstain from all rational thought and focus on the sounds of the night.

Her watch is uneventful. When the high summer stars travel halfway to the west, she wakes Valen and spreads her bedroll by Casavir's side. For a long time, she lies and listens to his breath. His left arm rests on the ground, his long, callous fingers are so close to her face, and Ingrid tries to resist the temptation to touch them. She fails and covers his open palm with hers. The sensation must be calling him back from his sleep: his breath changes slightly. She is about to withdraw her hand when his fingers trap it and give it a squeeze. Casavir turns his head to her questioningly, and Ingrid is flooded with sadness. She does not say anything. His fingers search her face and she is surprised to feel a wet trail down her cheek. Casavir starts, rolls over a little, pulls her closer and drapes his maimed arm over her frame.

Ingrid cries herself to sleep, listening to his heartbeat.

* * *

There is no inn in the first village they come across. They rent an empty farm from an elderly couple whose children left in search of work several summers ago. Jayne suggests they should have at least two days of rest before hitting the road – her flock of former slaves is tired; they have blisters on their feet, and the villagers can make shoes given some time. The farm has enough hay to make comfortable beds for the four dozen of them. What is more, the farm barn has enough small tubs, troughs and deep bowls for General Jayne to declare a bath day. Clearly, they all stink too much even for the adventurer's nose.

Ingrid is shy to demonstrate her scars to the world, so she arranges a small improvised bathhouse in the farm kitchen. When she feels clean enough, she decides to offer Casavir her help in washing his hair.

She finds him at the back of the barn. He has taken his worn shirt off and beats grime and sweat out of it. He has cleaned his torso with a cloth, for some foam still adorns his left shoulder. At her timid offer, he nods obediently and lets her lead him into the house. He has always been a very clean person.

Ingrid guides him to lie down onto a wide wooden bench so that his head rests in the basin she has put up on a low stool. She drops a tiny ball of fire into a pot of cold water; it bursts underneath the surface, and the water is instantly hot. Casavir cannot contain a happy sigh as she pours it into the basin. His eyes are firmly shut; he had to forego his band, and she knows he loathes the idea that she may see his empty eye sockets.

The soap lathers eagerly. She massages his scalp gently and her caressing hands wander to his jaw, neck and collarbones now and then. If he notices, he does not offer a comment. When his hair is clean, she supports his head and helps him sit up. She lets her hands rest on his shoulders. His brow creases in thought, and when his hand balls into a fist, Ingrid recognizes the moment as one of those when whatever has been brewing in his heart is ready to be spoken.

"When you speak, Gann holds his breath. Do you know that he is in love with you?" Casavir says in a steady, measured voice.

"I… do." Ingrid replies slowly. She did not expect that. "I cannot return his feelings."

Casavir is silent for some time. She waits patiently.

"You should." He replies finally. There is no emotion in his face at all. "I mean, you should return his feelings. He is a good, honorable man."

Ingrid recoils in fear.

"I cannot. I am your wife. I… We exchanged vows."

"Duty should not keep you tied up." Sadness swells in his words. "Sometimes, a priest can dissolve what has been sealed. Let me go to a monastery and free you of this bond."

"No." She says firmly, and he perks up, surprised at the steel in her voice. "No. I love you. I have travelled through hell and fire to find you, to bring you back. You cannot reject me. Do not dare to reject me."

"Look at me." Casavir demands. His eyelids fly open and his empty, scarred, inflamed eye sockets stare at her. He spreads his arms wide to demonstrate the scars crisscrossing his chest and the stump of his right arm. "Am I fit to be a husband? It hurts me to move. Before, I earned my place by your side fighting for you, protecting you. Now, I am a burden, even on a travel, to say nothing of a fight."

"I am done travelling, and I am done fighting." Ingrid cups his face and strokes the wrinkles around the wounds where his blue eyes used to be. She wants to cry, but she is not scared. "I love you. I need your heartbeat to scare my nightmares away. I want to feel a smile on your lips when I kiss you in the morning. I need your presence, your smell, your touch. I love you."

A grimace distorts his face and he shakes his head. When he speaks, his voice is hoarse, and he struggles to find words.

"My lady. Ingrid. I am… I am not… I am afraid I cannot give you children." He whispers finally, and Ingrid is suddenly so angry at all those who have hurt him that she is aching to get back to Luskan and level it with the ground.

"It is all right." She hears herself answer. "I don't think I can bear children anyway. The spirit-eater curse burnt through my body, and I think this kind of magic is gone for me."

This was the thundercloud hanging between them, and now Ingrid can almost hear it dissipate. He clasps her hands and presses them to his lips, mourning their lives that did not happen.

"You think you are a ruin, my love, but you cannot see me. I am a ruin as well, of a different kind, perhaps. I was growing cruel. I was growing mad. I was growing _evil_, Casavir. I was so empty, and then my soul was back, but I was still empty, a charred desert that walked and talked for some reason. I only remembered I needed you, to find you, to get back to you." Ingrid confesses her pain to his bowed head and continues in whisper. "Please do not abandon me. Please do not reject me. Please."

He pulls her into a desperate, suffocating embrace and there is no shadow between them anymore.


	13. Crossroad Keep Again

Disclaimer: I own nothing. This is the last chapter. Finis vitae sed non amoris.

* * *

13\. Crossroad Keep Again

They return to Crossroad Keep on a warm summer evening. The farmland is alive with reapers and the road is busy. Ingrid rides ahead of the open wagon they hired, and the golden fields, heavy with wheat and barley, gladden her peasant heart.

The first of her patrols they had met in the north sent a rider to the keep, and they are being expected. Guards cheer at the gates, people wave from balconies, Khelgar meets the arriving company in the courtyard and his whoop of greeting scares all the pigeons of the town off their roofs. And this is it. A feast and several reunions later, they excuse themselves to leave for their chambers. The normal life should be starting right at that moment, but it does not.

Casavir insists that they should go all the way upstairs to their old room in the tower. She understands him very well: he needs this closure, too. It takes them forever to climb all the steps they used to disregard. The outer door is too heavy, she must hold it while he struggles to push the key into the keyhole. Inside, the bolt is distinctly right-handed, the floor is treacherously uneven, the carpet rim is easy to trip over, the bed is painfully low, the furniture has sharp angles and stands in the way. When they are finally in bed, they barely have the strength to wish each other good night before passing out.

In the morning, a million duties are awaiting Ingrid, and there is nothing to do for Casavir. He chooses to stay in the room, he says humbly that he will unpack their bags. _Unpack our bags_, Ingrid thinks on her way to the main hall, _how long does it take to unpack our bags? How interesting is it?_ She takes a horse from the stables and rides to the market to talk with the merchants of various companies, to the newly constructed town hall, to the guards' headquarters, to the smiths' alley and to the temple. Everywhere she goes, she sees them. People with ugly scars. People who limp and lean on their canes. People with burn marks on their skin. People who are missing limbs. She talks to Kana and has to shout because Kana is hard on hearing after a sound explosion in a recent bandit ambush. She notices that the town is a merciless maze. That there are stairs, hills, pillars, sudden steps, pits, ditches, open sewers. That the new town hall has forty steps for the sake of_ decoration_, and no wall to hold on to when climbing them. That she is the one who pays for the construction of this maze.

As she leaves the temple, a dozen or so beggars hold out their hands for her alms, and she is horrified to see that most of them are cripples, that they are deadly thin, that all her golden fields are an illusion and there are people who starve under her rule. She distributes whatever money she has with her and beckons one beggar to follow her. He is around fifty, he is missing a leg, his scalp features an old gash across the right side. She sits down on the steps of the temple with him. He looks at her suspiciously first, but then relaxes. Let the noble lady sate her curiosity.

"How did you lose your leg, soldier?" Ingrid addresses him in her battle voice, and he is surprised enough to tell her the full story. Luskan war, second year. Ingrid listens to him and thinks that Casavir knew. That unlike her, he had been in a war when he had just one chance at healing a day, twenty wounded to choose from and no priests at hand. That he has seen veterans, men and women, drink themselves to death, that he has seen veterans hang themselves in country barns when their injuries made them a burden to their families. That he, an orphan of that terrible plague, had grown up in Neverwinter chapterhouse during the war, and probably was asked to restrain hundreds of soldiers while some priest was sawing their gangrenous limbs off or pulling arrows out.

And she never noticed. Oh, she noticed a lot, but these things have always been natural, part of the landscape. War after war after war washed over the coast and left these people in its wake. She had known prejudice and has fought prejudice whenever she witnessed it, but she has been ignorant of other things. The ignorance of healthy people, that should be the name for it. Ingrid feels so ashamed that her cheeks are aflame when she rides back to the castle.

She gives quick orders on the way and flies up the stairs. Casavir turns his head at the sound of the door creaking, and she sees that he has shaved. He has several cuts on his neck and along his jaw. She inhales the warm scent of his skin, nestles up against him in his arms and tells him firmly that she wants to move. That the castle suffocates her and the walls press down on her.

Her main and longest crusade is about to start.

* * *

Ingrid begins with small things to understand what works and what does not. She gets him a puppy, a lovely bitch with floppy ears and a velvet pelt, an excellent nose and too much love for this awful world. They teach the dog to stay focused and calm, to bark at stairs and pick up anything Casavir drops. A few days before Ingrid's name day he ventures to take the dog and go shopping on his own to buy a gift. He tells her about it in the evening – sheepishly, as if he expects her to get angry. She laughs and kisses him senseless.

She goes through all the new projects with Master Veedle and the old man is slowly convinced that every place except the ramparts and the defense towers should have a flat floor, every staircase should have banisters, every ditch should be covered with a metal grate, every street is to have a name and every house is to be assigned a number. Not written but cast in iron and placed at the same level on all the corners. Then she tells him that they need to think big. The way the town is growing and the land prices are rising, the town will be a city before long, and she wants him to mark the fields around the first city wall into the future streets, squares, parks and the necessary public buildings all the way up to the external wall she is planning to construct in ten or fifteen years. She also wants aqueducts, a good sewage system and roads constructed there before any buildings spring up. The new districts must have light and space and fresh air. She can see Master Veedle's eyes glint with excitement and he asks her how many yards she wants between the old wall and the new one. He almost has a heart attack when she points at the line that she has drawn on the map: three miles away.

Kharin, her orc architect, has a different task. Over the long winter, while the Lady of the Keep and her husband stay at Phoenix Tail at the foot of the castle hill, they design a project of their own house. Ingrid will have it built on the border of the future city districts. Its doors will open into a large garden shared with a temple and an orphanage. With Casavir, they run through every little detail inside and outside. Not a bath, but a shower room and a small pool with wide steady steps descending into it and two bars to hold on to. A decorative panel that runs along each wall and tells what room it is. Doors that open both ways and with no effort. Handles and handrails by every seat. Gravel paths in the garden to hear the people who walk by. One floor, with an extra half-floor at the back to address the natural incline and host a stable for several horses.

She also designs the furniture meticulously and hones her habits. If she wants Casavir to be comfortable, she needs to learn to put everything exactly in the place where it should be, no exceptions and no slack cut for tired priestesses after a night's vigil.

* * *

By late spring, Ingrid has everything planned. She has three enemies to defeat: poverty, ignorance and disease. She will not be able to hold it all on her own back, and some of her plans are expensive, but she has a plan to address this issue as well. Every other evening, there is a dinner at their inn suite, where several more people are infected with her ideas and join her campaign. Every weekend, there is a meeting where Ingrid listens to the reports of those she has put in charge of something and distributes new tasks with military precision. Several small schools are established, with the prospect of a small school in every village. Each trading company is offered a place for a public building that they can name after themselves – a bathhouse, a library, or a small infirmary. Every church that sends healers to distant villages once a month is freed from taxes, and Ingrid enters the roster herself to set an example. The Graycloaks are divided into city patrols and country patrols, and each small office gets a canteen with free meals for former soldiers and a veteran squad that is responsible for training and training only. One does not need legs to supervise archers, Ingrid answers quietly when she is asked if they should strive to employ the disabled. Valen and Jayne have had enough rest and they join the city guard. If they rise in the ranks, this will be their own progress, but for now Ingrid is glad that sometimes she will get objective, unfiltered opinion of her reforms over dinner.

In an old village closer to Neverwinter, she finds a former mansion of some noble lord whose line declined and vanished. The mansion is bought to host an institution the Sword Coast has never seen before. Ingrid funds it with her own efforts, for it is an experiment. It is a farm and a line of workshops near a large building where fifty people with grave injuries learn some trade, or reading and arithmetic, or just life with hope. Ingrid travels to the mansion monthly in a small carriage – five hours are too valuable to spend riding if she can check budgets or read letters during that time. She talks to those who are ready to go into the world. She finds some place for them, one person at a time. She often asks Casavir to travel there with her, and gradually he picks the duty up and lifts it off her shoulders.

* * *

In the autumn, they move into their new house. The garden around it has not grown yet, and many things will need improvement, but it is a start. They travel to Neverwinter to buy several horses, tame and schooled to perfection. She walks Casavir through the back of the house and shows another secret to him: if he leads a horse into the small stall in the backyard and ties the reins to the post, he can climb several very safe steps and ease himself into the saddle with no harm to his back. There are no low arcs or bridges on the roads anymore – everything is suitable for tall wagons, and this is but an extra benefit. Horses have their own eyes. He is excited to try it at once, and they ride out together. They gallop across the meadows and trot up to the castle, and though he is tired by the end of the day, it is freedom. Another bit of freedom they are winning from the cruel fate. Like the books the children from the orphanage read to him to practice their skills. Like the shopping he does with a basket tied to his maimed arm, a walking staff in his hand, his dog at his heel. Like those four weekly hours of teaching when he goes to the small school near the town hall to share what he has been taught about history. Like the small pile of wooden planks with selected poetry carved out by Gann so that every letter can be discerned by touch rather than vision.

Her husband is alive, and together they are a force of _good_.

* * *

Gann approaches their house one sunny afternoon. Casavir is at the orphanage, and the garden is very quiet. First the dog gives a friendly bark, then Ingrid can hear steps on the gravel path, and then Gann greets her from the low gate between the bushes. He is wearing his travel cloak, and Ingrid immediately knows that he is leaving. Forever or for a very long time. She throws the tomatoes she has been dicing on the garden table into the bowl and welcomes him warmly. Gann is full of that sweet sadness that engulfs people at the end of one chapter of their life and before the beginning of another.

"I am leaving for Thay. Sand will open up the portal tonight, and I will stay with Safiya for a couple weeks." He explains to her. "I think I will find Kaelyn. The Wall of the Faithless is still standing."

Ingrid gives his hand a squeeze. Her eyes grow distant and he knows that she is reliving the same memory. One of those few memories nobody shares but the two of them. That first time, in a dream in the hags' lair, when they encountered a man who had betrayed her, and she wept over his pain because his punishment was too cruel even for that rotten person who had caused several hundred deaths and never repented.

"Wait here."

She returns with a long wooden box and presses it into his hands. He opens the clasps and the Silver Sword of Gith is there on a simple grey cushion. It is whole and a glimmer runs across its blade when Ingrid looks into the box over his shoulder.

"I cannot wield it." He states tentatively.

"Someone may be able to. Give it to Kaelyn. Let everyone try it, let the sword choose its next owner. In the worst case, you can always send it back with Safiya."

They exchange a sad smile. Gann lingers for a moment as if he wants to say something else, but before she can give him a questioning look, he decides against it and leaves.

Ingrid sends a warm, heart-felt blessing at his back.

* * *

Gradually, over the years, she teaches her city to run itself. First, small decisions like a new monument or the design of the river bank park are delegated to committees of volunteers, then public discussions are introduced, then guilds are formed and she sits in their monthly meetings and grooms one or another promising person to guide the politics of a small circle so that decisions are effective and yet do not take forever to take. Her husband adopts her style, he is the Prefect of Veterans, after all, and soldiers are a difficult folk to convince outside the frames of formal hierarchy.

A decade later, they have their first serious argument – publicly, in front of the newly minted City Council. It has delegates from the guilds, the merchant companies, the farmers' associations, the miners, the three most influential churches and the city guard. The argument is, surprisingly, over the existence of brothels, and it ends in her calling him a prude. That night he takes every effort to prove to her that he is not, and they compromise later that they should both abstain from throwing their authority in on such topics, because, _well, who would trust a priestess and a paladin to be experts in these matters_?

* * *

Many more things will follow. They will fight another brief war with Luskan over several villages at the border that have seceded and pledged their loyalty to Neverwinter. The City Council will vote for the decisions she does not like, and she will stamp down on some of her progressive values to support the most vulnerable one: that people do not need a lord to make good decisions. She will barely survive an attempt of assassination that will lead Kana to discover a conspiracy among the richer nobles of Neverwinter. Lord Nasher will demand her to choose her successor and he will give up after two hours of rational argument and a shouting match to crown it. A new monk order will declare her arcane and divine practice a heresy – when Kaelyn's grandfather shows up at her trial, golden wings and all, and delivers them a message from Sehanine herself, they will condescend, but question her marital status out of spite. Ingrid and Casavir will have a spectacular public wedding to appease the monks and seal the question once and forever. Some of her proteges will disappoint her, and some others will exceed her expectations beyond hope. She will descend into the depths of blackest despair, and Casavir will try a hundred different things to bring her back from it, and his loving patience will defeat that darkness. A plague will hit the Sword Coast and the city with her renowned healthcare will be flooded by thousands of refugees, and Ingrid and Casavir will spend nights and days healing them, teaching them and demonstrating to the scared citizens that they are not afraid to catch anything from the 'dirty migrants'. Like all people who do something, they will often be blamed for not doing more. There will be a period when she is hated and called 'immoral' for standing her ground that even the worst criminals deserve life. There will be a day when he is attacked by an angry mob displeased that the schools under his care teach anatomy. There will be corner theatres that give obscene performances at their expense. There will be people who name their children after the two of them.

All this will happen many years later, but today Casavir is sitting in the sun and listening to one of his younger pupils read. Ingrid appears in the doorway to ask if they want a piece of her apple-pie, but she stops to gaze at her husband. He feels the warmth of the spring sun on his skin and raises his head to welcome it. He smiles absently, and Ingrid's whole soul lights up with that smile.


End file.
